The Clothes Make the Girl (Look Fat)?

by Brittany Gibbons

  You’re definitely going to pee more, that’s a given. And due to nursing, your nipples may morph from something fun into two numb chew toys at the ends of your boobs. My nipples are purely decorative at this point. And finally, the general shape of your body and how clothes fit will change, and that’s not a bad thing, it’s just new.

  Once we all make peace with these realities, maybe it doesn’t matter whether we get back into our prebaby clothes. Maybe we should be rewarding ourselves with new ones that celebrate the really awesome thing we just survived, fat vagina and all.

  CHAPTER 10

  I Dress Like a Mom Now, Apparently

  For a split second, I assumed my mom style would go one of two ways: all cute boyfriend jeans, oversized sunnies, and a perfectly messy bun pushing a pram through a ritzy outdoor mall sipping iced coffee, or full-on Maria von Trapp in a dress made of curtains to coordinate with my brood’s outfits as I instructed them on perfect harmony and amazing marionette action.

  It turns out, I look terrible in boyfriend jeans, I can’t sew, and puppets terrify me. My real postbaby style can best be described as postapocalyptic.

  For starters, I think we all need to acknowledge that giving birth to a baby is a real medical event that involves months of prep and recovery. So, on top of healing and bleeding and milking and hoping your vagina regains some sense of its former self, you’ve also been handed a real live baby.

  Andy had his impacted wisdom teeth removed and he was sent home with extra gauze and instructions not to work or be responsible for anything in the immediate future. I had another person removed from inside me via the same area I was now expected to pee out from and sit on, and they sent me home with a baby to keep alive and some Tylenol. Something does not compute. Oh, right, sexism!

  How any of us managed to be dressed at all during this time in our lives is a goddamn miracle. Perhaps if I’d only decided to raise my children in a nudist colony, I might have had a higher level of self-care, especially when my only real requirement for being seen in public was wearing clothes with “no visible blood or milk on them.”

  When you first come home from the hospital, everything is about survival, and that looks different for both of you. There’s the actual baby, who has to have specific needs met, like being fed, clean, happy, and rested. Then there is you, and the bar drops significantly with requirements such as a heart rate or a blink that’s long enough to technically be considered a nap.

  You realize really quickly that a happy baby is best for your mental health, so your whole day becomes consumed with chasing that happiness. You are a 24/7 diner that feeds on demand. You sing silly songs, make funny noises, and fly through diapers. Little parts of you get tucked away because it’s easier. You remove your earrings, because the baby could pull them out. You stop wearing your favorite perfume, because it irritates the baby. You stop doing your hair, because you only throw it up in a bun anyways so the baby’s little fingers don’t get tangled in it. Your wardrobe becomes a mishmash of lingering maternity clothes, and new cheap pieces you picked up because you just wanted something easy.

  This was a period during which I became very reliant on my sense of smell. I smelled the babies constantly, checking their bottoms in case they pooped, or the fat rolls under their chins to see if milk had soured there. I smelled my clothes, both on and off my body. Yes, the baby threw up on this shirt, but it blends with the print, does it smell too much for me to wear again? Have I worn this underwear already? Is this food or poop? It’s food. No, it’s poop; fuck.

  I remember we scheduled a family and newborn shoot three months after having our first son, Jude, and the night before, I called the photographer and told her it’d only be the baby, no family photos. Andy didn’t understand it, but nothing fit me or made me feel good. I was sitting on my bed surrounded by clothes that’d been torn out of the closet and tried on, and none of them made me feel pretty, my hair hadn’t been done in months, and all I envisioned was this adorable family photo of Andy and Jude, and then me. People would look at that picture and think, Yikes, that guy is way hotter than that sweaty lady holding that cute baby.

  I mean, I used to think that. Now when I see that exact photo play out on Facebook, I am like, “High five, Mom, that jerk in the clean cargo shorts better have taken you to brunch after this photo was taken!” We moms have to stick together.

  I began to resent Andy during this period because when he came home from work he closed the door when he went to the bathroom, and I realized that he got to do that all day. When he had to pee, he got up from his desk and went to the bathroom by himself at his own pace, in a private room. And then he ate his lunch next to his friends, but he only spooned the food into his own mouth, not any of his coworkers’ mouths.

  I began to resent Andy when he asked me to put deodorant on the shopping list for him. I realized that I hadn’t bought deodorant for myself in a really long time; my stick was still full and unused on the bathroom counter because all I did was sit on the couch all day with the baby. And I had decided that this activity did not require deodorant.

  I began to resent Andy when he walked out of the bedroom in a clean pair of jeans, and when I asked him where he was going, he said nowhere. He just wanted to change into something clean.

  I began to resent Andy for caring for himself.

  Sometime between the doctor handing me the baby and screaming into a pillow at 4 A.M. our first night home, I made the decision that my kids should come before me, always. It didn’t matter that I looked and smelled like I had crawled out of a Dumpster, as long as they were clean and dressed impeccably. I could do without so that they could look adorable.

  I didn’t have a winter coat until two years after I had my last child. I live in the snow belt of Ohio, and it’s blistering cold. I got by, using a large green zip-up sweatshirt I’d stolen from my dad. All of my underwear was old and faded, with the elastic separating from the material. I bought liquid hem glue to fix the holes I’d worn in the inner thighs of my faded black leggings so that I could still wear them in public. It wasn’t really a matter of money; it was a matter of low self-worth.

  Everything I used to do for myself, the hair coloring, new clothes, and doctor visits, all felt suddenly so selfish. And it’s crazy to think back to that time, treating buying pants that fit or seeing a doctor for a cough with the same level of mom shame that comes with abandoning your baby in a box at Walmart.

  Not only was I putting the needs of my children above my own, I was woefully unprepared for how much being a mom stripped away from me feeling like a woman. I no longer felt like it was my goal to feel desired by anyone, it was my goal to feel like my children were well and cared for and loved. That made disappearing oh so easy.

  At first there was a definite unspoken agreement that Andy and I would just buckle down and focus on keeping our heads above water. We had three babies in less than four years, and much of our day was lost to potty training, feeding, playing, rocking. I was so engulfed in all of that that I missed the exit ramp back to adult womanhood.

  I just wasn’t capable of being a mom and a woman, or a mom and a wife. And I went to great lengths to make the necessary excuses to prove these were indeed mutually exclusive.

  I would purposely let the baby fall asleep in our bed so that Andy wouldn’t try to have sex. I’d explain away my need for something by spending all my money on something for the baby, who needed it more. And I filled up all the cracks and weaknesses in my arguments with cement made from the shame and judgment I tossed toward other moms.

  “Did you see that Erin and Mike went on a cruise? Who’s watching their one-year-old? The burglar who’s probably robbing them because they posted they were out of town on Facebook?”

  “Oh, look, another Instagram selfie of Cara’s new haircut. I guess that explains why she can’t afford to come to baby astrology jazz yoga anymore.”

  “Gosh, I’d love to go on a date with you, Andy, but I’m too busy keeping our children
alive.”

  Not only was this crazy motherhood Stockholm syndrome bad for very obvious mental health reasons, it was also very bad for my children. I was teaching them that there was a time limit to self-care, and it expired when you had kids of your own.

  In case you haven’t figured this out yet, there is no such time limit. Caring for and loving your kids should not come at the expense of caring for and loving yourself, even though it might feel like the right thing to do at the time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to take a minute to figure out this whole messy parenting thing, but I am all for you doing it in the stretchiest pants possible.

  A huge part of our job as parents is being the first people in line teaching our kids how to value themselves. From childhood to adulthood, we are instilling in them the belief that they matter, that they should always be seen and heard, and that their worth is without limit.

  I was giving my kids that very message from the comfort of the same clothes I’d been wearing for three days, with my matted hair in a bun, and an unexplained rash on my arm that I hadn’t gone to the doctor about, right after I had walked away from my reflection in the mirror after calling myself fat in front of them no less than three times.

  Then I think of my daughter, in particular, and see her growing into a strong young woman who knows her power and her voice. That woman is not hiding in the back of a photo wearing broken flip-flops and expired contacts.

  I know it’s hard to take time for you. It feels selfish and like you’re failing as a good mom. That feeling will eventually go away, especially when you start seeing the effects of your self-worth in the way your children see you.

  My kick in the ass came from an unexpected place: my children’s school. Theirs, like a few others around the country, enacted a rule banning parents from wearing pajamas to school pickups and drop-offs. This was being done as a means of setting an example of professionalism for the students, and maybe to counteract the sight of first-day-of-school parents doing body shots and shotgunning pot smoke into each other’s mouths in the parking lot. Although, to be fair, the joke is on the administration because I can sleep in anything, which means virtually everything I own is technically pajamas.

  But this new rule meant that I now not only had to spend my mornings screaming at my kids to brush their teeth, do their hair, and put on clean clothes, I also had to do all of that for myself, too. I tried explaining to the school secretary that I wrote from home, and that my pajamas were what I actually wore to work, and she told me that I should set higher standards for myself, and that there was nothing wrong with a healthy routine of putting clean clothes on each morning.

  And when I got back to my car, I sat there thinking of all the times I herded my children into the school wearing a nightgown and Ugg boots, or the time I had to run back home to grab Wyatt’s forgotten history report, and appeared in the school office wearing a sweatshirt and men’s boxers, or the day I forgot I had volunteered to drive for the class field trip, and had to chaperone kids to a pioneer village dressed in an adult Pikachu onesie, and I suddenly realized that this new stupid rule was enacted because of me.

  Here I thought I was being the selfless mom driving her kids all over and keeping it all together, when in reality, I was dressed like Cousin Eddie and I had absolutely nothing together. I don’t know what rock bottom is supposed to feel like, but if an entire elementary school makes a dress code purely as an attempt to get you to wear pants, like they had a meeting about it and printed flyers and everything, I feel like maybe I had hit it.

  I went home and ordered some jeggings from American Eagle, some new tank tops from Old Navy, and some flats from Target. This “mom” wardrobe was bland, nothing fancy or trendy, but it was new and clean, and the more I adjusted to getting up in the morning and putting on real clothes, and brushing my teeth, the more I remembered what it was like to feel independently human.

  The next year, Andy and I ended up switching the kids’ school for reasons totally unrelated to the administration making me wear pants, but effects had taken hold, and the changes began to seep into many parts of our lives. As a family, we began to leave the house, go to movies, and get family pictures taken again, with all of the actual family members. As a married couple, Andy and I were going on dates, and I was taking time out of my day to consciously stop chasing after kids, and kiss my husband because I wanted to, and because I missed that companionship and intimacy. As a woman, I was enjoying spending money on myself, buying clothes that made me feel good, and giving myself permission to check out to get a pedicure or get off by myself in the bathroom.

  I was a mom raising her children to love themselves . . . and still figuring that out for myself, too.

  “Push it through. Push it through!” I screamed, covering my face with my hands.

  “I’m trying.” Andy winced. “It’s hitting something and it won’t go through.”

  He stepped back from the chair I had dragged into the bathroom, an ice cube in one hand, a small earring in the other.

  “You just need to force it through really fast,” I explained.

  “The hole is closed.” He set the earring on the counter. “You need to go to a professional.”

  Clearly, Andy has never pierced his belly button with a safety pin and an ice cube on the floor of his bedroom while watching TRL.

  It had been eleven years since I had worn earrings. In the last photo I have of me wearing them, I am sitting on a swing in the park with tiny Jude laughing on my lap. Shortly after the photo was taken, his chubby hand lurched for the dangling bronze bohemian earrings, and my mom scooped him up and playfully scolded him before looking at me and telling me that my days of earrings were over.

  “You’re a mom now. No more fun stuff.” She shrugged.

  I gave in. Then.

  I pierced my nose when I turned twenty-two, and the second night I had it, the tiny diamond stud got caught on the sleeve of Andy’s sweatshirt as he reached across me in bed. He pulled it clean out, blood and clear pus leaking out of the hole as I screamed in pain. I tried to put the diamond back in, but the nose ring was shaped like a corkscrew—ironically, to keep it comfortable and from coming out—so twisting it back into the now-larger and seeping hole was impossible.

  I went to the piercing shop to get the nose piercing redone the next afternoon, and it was so painful as the piercer tried to screw the earring back in that I threw up down the front of me, asked him to stop, and decided to let the hole heal. It took a week.

  But were these holes really closed? I could still see them on the front and back of my ear, and every so often when I was being particularly gross and obsessive about picking at my face in the magnifying mirror, I’d squeeze them and weird white stuff would come out. That’s never a good sign, right?

  My self-care routine fell into place quickly. Almost like muscle memory, one positive step forward begat another. I started getting my hair touched up every month. The occasional pedicure turned into a regular thing. I fell in love with shopping again, of trying new styles and clothes. I was dressing a foreign body, and instead of dreading the process, I began to embrace it and share it with the online community I created through my blog.

  But these earrings . . . they were the final piece. The last reclamation of the womanhood that I’d surrendered during the early days of motherhood. And the only thing that stood in the way of it was a tiny piece of skin?

  I pushed the earring through my ear as hard as I could. It stung and immediately burned, but it was in.

  The old hole was still there, after all.

  CHAPTER 11

  I Would Like to Dedicate a Moment of Silence for My Thighs

  “You have the thighs of a sprinter,” my dad called out as I pushed to catch up.

  When I was a little girl my father would head out twice a week after dinner to run the outdoor track at his old high school. He often bounced between manic episodes of exercise and near anorexia, before long and tedious lapses of housebound depression
, and lately we’d been on a manic trend.

  I was eight and tagged along on his runs, desperate to soak up every ounce of him, even if it meant he would be disappointed in what I ate. I missed him so much when he’d disappear into his depression, and while neither version of him was real anymore, I preferred the one that sat at our dinner table with us and let me sing Jim Croce songs with him in his truck.

  I spent my time at the track walking the benches of the stadium and acting out Paula Abdul music videos, but every once in a while joining him in running his laps. I struggled to keep up, but he assured me I had an innate sense of pace.

  “Your legs are made to run.” He nodded as he downed his water back at the truck and I struggled to pull my ridden-up shorts back down between my legs.

  Four years later, I signed up for track and was placed on shot put. “It’s where we put the sturdy girls,” the coach assured me. She never even asked to see me run.

  My thighs are underestimated.

  I was called Thunder Thighs in the seventh grade at Centennial Quarry by a boy named David. Thunder Thighs is a ridiculous insult. As if having thighs as loud and as powerful as thunder was a bad thing—hell, that basically makes me an X-Man. But when you’re a young girl, difference, even the powerful kind, is spat back at you like shame.

  It was my first time at a quarry. I’ve always had an intense fear of them ever since I asked my mom how deep they were, and she said they were endless.

  “You can never tell when you’re at their deepest point,” she explained. “And beneath you it’s all jagged rocks, darkness, and sunken machinery.”

  I was with my friends Lauren and Abby, and we were meeting the three boys we’d met at the fair the week before. We had been walking around the pits before the start of the demolition derby, ogling the cars before they entered the ring to get smashed apart. Early September in Ohio is always stifling hot, and the fairgrounds were sweaty and humid. The pits reeked of gasoline fumes and oil. We grabbed cotton candy and made our way up to the grandstand to watch the leveling and were joined shortly after by two filthy, grease-covered boys who were looking for seats to watch how the car they’d been working on would do.