I wore my shirt backwards all day. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon when I looked down and saw the shirt’s tag that should’ve been on my back underneath my neck.

“I’ve had my shirt on backwards all day long and nobody told me,” I said to no one in particular.

“Well none of us noticed,” someone said.

I’m not quite sure how to take that comment.

On the one hand, the baseball-style shirt had printing on the front and the back and had a rounded collar. So it could be easily worn backwards and no one would think twice.

On the other hand, maybe my friends think it would be perfectly natural for me to wear my clothes backwards.

That’s an even scarier thought.

I’ve made embarrassing clothing mistakes in the past, but I usually had my kids to blame the goof on. When the boys were young, I remember walking out of church with a big crowd.

I looked over my shoulder to say “hi” to a friend, and I noticed the seam of my sweater was on the outside instead of on the inside.

“Oh my gosh,” I told my friend. “My shirt was on inside out and nobody told me.”

She looked at me with a sympathetic glance.

“I thought you meant to wear your shirt like that,” she said, the embarrassment of having such a dumb friend evident in her eyes.

“Only crazy people wear their clothes inside out,” I snapped and then ran into the bathroom to turn my sweater right side out.

That incident stands out as much as the time I forgot to take the plastic stick-on tag off the front of a new sweater. I bought an extra-large size because I don’t like tight sweaters and, frankly, that size was the one that fit best.

I bought the sweater for a very special occasion – my eldest son was in the homecoming court for Stephen F. Austin High School, and the court was being presented to the football crowd that evening.

Nick and I walked out to the middle of the field, waiting to see if his name would be called. When they said his name as the homecoming king, I was one proud mother as dozens of cameras took pictures.

Standing on the sidelines after all the celebrating, I looked down and realized I’d never removed the plastic see-through stick-on tag with a big XL down the front of my sweater.

Maybe nobody noticed, I thought. I’d know for sure when I saw the photos our newspaper’s photographer, Russell Autrey, had taken.

I went into the newspaper office early the next morning and pounded on the dark room door, begging Russell to show me those pictures.

He pulled the image up on the screen and there, the lights reflecting on that plastic strip on the front of my sweater, were two big letters – “X” and “L.”

I fell to my knees and begged Russell to help me. Thanks to Russell’s wizardry with Photoshop, he removed the embarrassing faux pas.

I consoled myself with knowing the only ones who might have noticed the tag were my family. And maybe the homecoming court. And maybe the hundreds of people in the stands.

If there’d been a hole nearby, I’d have crawled in it and never come out.

As I turned my shirt around in the ladies room, I had to admit being oblivious to my clothes wasn’t new behavior for me.

So maybe when the guys in the white suits come to take me away, I’ll feel right at home in that straitjacket that buckles in the back.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.