Friends, Old and New
“Cassandra.” By Oscar Yanes Cuevas.
Why do mums dress differently than others? I had my first inkling of why when my tiny niece smeared her greasy hands all over my silk shirt as a sign of affection. I always thought that if I became a mother myself, I would just wash my clothes more often. Turns out it isn’t that simple.
My experience of childbirth was destructive, and an experience from which I needed to recover. Yes, I created a life, but its creation destroyed me—at least in the short term. It destroyed my body, my sleeping habits, and my sense of self. The person who looked back at me in the mirror was not the sophisticated adult I had spent almost 20 years becoming—it was the teenager I had been at 15: lumpy, clueless, distraught, emotional, confused, and lost. Those were memories I didn’t want to revisit. When my son was four weeks old, I began power walking. When he was five weeks old I started running. I shouldn’t have pushed myself, and at times it felt harder than childbirth itself. I wanted to cry at the huge effort it took lugging my heavy body around the park circuit while pushing a pram, but my boyfriend encouraged me and we did it together. At six weeks, I started doing at-home online fitness videos. I felt like a crazed 80s housewife, exhausted, running on coffee and adrenaline with her home workout videos. Perhaps if I could “get my body back,” I could get myself back? That’s what I thought. But it wasn’t happening fast enough.
“Bianca.” By Oscar Yanes Cuevas.
Meanwhile, I was still wearing the maternity clothes that I wanted to burn and the breast-feeding dresses that only seemed to highlight my feelings of failure. I purchased them with such excitement that in hindsight was optimism. What I didn’t know then was that the breast-feeding they were supposed to simplify felt like a doomed exercise. My milk never came in, or rather it trickled in and there was never enough. The G-cup boobs I carried on my body felt like a useless taunt to my hungry baby. They overwhelmed my body, they didn’t do their job. But still I kept trying. And the promise of weight loss through breastfeeding was also false. It was a sedentary exercise that was frustrating. Constantly being awake meant that I was constantly snacking and I never produced enough milk to feel like the fat-burning machine that was promised to me. I had thought I’d still maintain my routine. Wake up in the morning, dress, do my hair, put on makeup; but there was no longer a distinction between night and day. The baby woke up every three hours, sometimes fed for hours on end. When was pyjama time and when was clothes time? It didn’t matter. Over the endless months of sleepless nights and a baby that barely napped, my former reality was gone, and with it, the fashioned self I had been.
I realized that what I had been no longer worked. This sense of ill-fitting wrongness was captured by the structured coats and blazers in my closet. Expensive. Textured. Tailored. They weren’t going to work for my baby. He needed something soft he could snuggle into. I needed jumpers. Those soft, colored sacks that hang loosely from the shoulders and end somewhere below the waist. And then what? I didn’t know how to wear jumpers. I hated jumpers in all their unstructured mess. Maybe I could wear dresses instead? Loose boho dresses with hats and sandals? I started to look online. I tried some from my wardrobe. But short dresses seemed awkward to wear at home when one is always bending down, and long voluminous ones are too cumbersome for domestic work and babies. I started to understand why mums wore activewear. I started to observe what the other joggers were wearing, the other walkers—the other mums. I saw a mum in a clothing store with a baby younger than mine looking impossibly trim. I went home and cried. I felt jealous. I was almost never jealous. I had always thought that whatever I wanted, whatever I needed, if I set my mind to it, I could do. And it usually worked. But the lumpy body wouldn’t shift and was completely incongruous with the clothes I had. Even the maternity clothes didn’t work anymore. They were all proportioned for a bulbous belly. But my belly was a series of soft rolls and my bulbous boobs made me feel like a pornstar.
The faux black leather leggings. By Oscar Yanes Cuevas.
My super supportive and beautiful boyfriend was smart. He took me on a shopping spree to the local thrift store for Mother’s Day. He said I could buy whatever I wanted but the rules were that I had to think differently. I had to think like a mum. I headed to the jumpers section. He headed to the leggings section. And together we made two outfits I was happy with. Faux black leather leggings with a thin cable knit jumper in cream we would later call “Cassandra,” and a grey sweater with white stripes across the hips we would later call “Bianca.” My clothes were grey, white, and beige—boring. But they were okay and good for my baby. He snuggled into them.
I don’t look like the old me anymore, but my baby now sleeps better at night, so the bags under my eyes have lightened. My skin is less pale. I know the difference between night and day, and theoretically I could wake up, dress, do my hair, and put on makeup, but the old me is broken. Those habits might come back. Or maybe they won’t.
One year later I don’t care quite as much. It strikes me as odd that an industry aimed directly at women still hasn’t come up with a fashionable solution to this. Or maybe it’s just me. I still don’t think I’ve worked it out. But I do know that the clothes I need are different now.
I’m not sure what will become of the structured blazers and high heels. Maybe I’ll wear them again, maybe I won’t. It seems strange to think that a wardrobe carefully built over a decade, cumulatively worth thousands of dollars, could be useless overnight, but that is in fact what happened. If anyone had tried to warn me, I wouldn’t have believed them. I thought that I would just buckle down, lose weight, and wear my clothes again. I love them. They are like friends. I missed them most while I was pregnant and longed to wear them again after he was born. I had been imagining we would be reacquainted after six weeks, maybe even three months maximum. But 12 months later the reunion has yet to arrive, and even those I have met again feel different. Like Patricia Field said once of the wardrobe in Sex and the City, “You don’t use the same dialogue more than once, so why would you use the same outfit twice?”
The sneakers. By Oscar Yanes Cuevas.
When life changes your wardrobe has to change, too. It’s not about washing silk shirts like I thought it would be; it’s about needing looser shapes (at least to start with) and warm things against his cheek. It’s sometimes being in activewear all day because you get in from your run and he’s hungry so you don’t have time to shower and change straight away. Or maybe you choose to wear activewear all day because it’s stretchy. It’s flat shoes so you don’t trip when you are holding him. To the mums who wear heels, well done. I’m a little scared. Holding a baby in heels requires a different equilibrium. It’s like learning to walk in heels all over again. It’s like being a teenager.
Fashion and motherhood for me has meant saying goodbye to old friends and learning to make new ones, trying to shop in the tiny stolen fragments of time you can call your own. So why do mothers dress differently? Because they must. Because just like they have borne a child, they have also borne themselves as a mother. And even though they are a thousand other things—a partner, a friend, a sister, a runner, a cook, a daughter, a student, a shoulder to lean on, some sort of professional high-powered something, or not—they need to hold their baby close, they need to play, stoop, and sometimes chase. They need to cuddle and pat and clean up messes, sometimes on their baby, sometimes on themselves. They need to juggle, lean, and hold multiple things on their hips, sometimes the baby, sometimes the shopping, and sometimes the rubbish.
They dress differently because they are living differently and because they are different. They have embraced a new role that will change over time but will never go away. Life has changed completely, but life does that—it moves forward, not backward. And with that change we move forward in new and different directions, and into new and different clothes.
