Mama Mia

by Mia Freedman

  If only I’d known then how much more stressful things were about to become.

  FROM SEQUINS TO SUITS

  SMS to Jo from me:

  ‘In fitting room. Buying grey jacket and black skirt. RIP fashion.’

  A couple of weeks before I started at Nine, I went shopping for Clothes To Wear In My New Life. I was still breastfeeding and hadn’t really bought new clothes for months. For me, this was strange. More than strange, it was alarming. Because since I was, oh, about six, if you’d asked me to list my hobbies, ‘Shopping For Clothes’ would be close to the top. Okay, the top.

  Where had my urge to splurge gone?

  It appears I’d left it at the hospital with the placenta and my pelvic-floor muscles. Because apart from losing interest in news, popular culture and my ambition, another thing I misplaced after giving birth was my interest in fashion. Poof. Gone. Buh-bye.

  It didn’t help that escorting me home from the maternity ward like Beyonce’s bodyguards were two enormous bosoms strapped to my chest. I’m not used to carrying around gigantic jugs and when nature sends them my way post-partum, I tend to grapple with them awkwardly

  Perhaps this is what it feels like after you’ve had a boob job—like someone else’s breasts have been shoved under your skin. By the time my milk comes in, I’ve gone from a small pre-pregnancy B cup to a D or DD, which is astonishing to me and baffling to my wardrobe. While breastfeeding, my bosoms can accurately be described as ‘cumbersome’.

  When you’re used to having small boobs, big ones are a trip.

  I think they look perfectly lovely on other women—but on me? I find them intimidating. They seem to mock everything I try to put them in. There seem to be only two fashion options: mumsy or sexy. And sexy is the last thing I feel when my boobs are big. They may look sexy on other women, but on my body I associate big hooters with fertility and lactation.

  If I could have written my clothes a letter when I started at Nine, it would have gone something like this:

  Dear Wardrobe,

  I think I’m going to have to break up with you. I’m sorry. It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve changed. Thanks for the memories. And the sequins. Missing you already.

  Love,

  Mia xxx

  After years of working with some of Australia’s most fashion-forward young things, I’d moved to an environment where I was surrounded entirely by men in suits. This played havoc with my fashion headspace.

  In my old working life, my staff became nervous if I ever turned up to work wearing black or anything resembling a suit. Even jackets made them fret. Was someone important coming in for a meeting? Was I going to see the big (male) bosses? Might the world be about to end?

  The word ‘corporate’ rarely featured in my fashion vocabulary while I was at ACP. Every day was a riot of colour, layering, sparkles and clashing prints. Denim was a constant and impractical evening shoes were standard. There were no rules.

  I was a walking canvas for my own artistic expression and I dressed to impress and entertain, both my team and myself. And they impressed and entertained me right back. I enjoyed the daily fashion banter. It wasn’t unusual for me to interrupt a meeting to comment on how great a colleague’s cleavage looked and inquire as to whether she’d found a new bra. ‘Talk me through your outfit,’ was not an unusual form of greeting in the corridors of ACP.

  While there was certainly an element of one-upmanship, it was never about labels; more about looks. Whether your outfit came from Supré or Scanlan & Theodore was immaterial; in fact, there was more kudos to be gained from bagging a bargain. How you put it together and how right-now it looked was key.

  And then I moved to television. Suddenly I was in a corporate environment where fashion had no currency. No one cared about the new sass & bide jeans or that Willow had done a diffusion line for Portmans. No one asked where I got my shoes. No one referred to clothes at all. Ever. They were just…clothes.

  This should have been a crushing disappointment because I’ve always enjoyed the creativity involved in getting dressed for work. But surprisingly, it was a massive relief. Relief to be off the fancy dress treadmill. Relief that my outfits no longer had to be clever or tricky or of-the-moment. Relief that my clothes were now background noise, not the main event. Relief that not only would no one notice if I wore the same outfit twice in a week, the care factor would be zero if I wore the same outfit every day for a year.

  However, this seismic shift from fashion forward to fashion background was not without challenges. Neutral clothes, corporate clothes, clothes that say take-me-seriously? Well, they don’t just fall onto your back. You have to find them and buy them and put them together.

  A quick inventory of my wardrobe before I started my new job revealed the following: I owned far too many silly shoes, far too many floaty tops and far too much denim for my new life. Fortunately, the copious quantities of sequined and sparkly clothes I possessed had been shoved in a cupboard some months before. Sparkly does not work when you are pregnant or breastfeeding.

  Also useless when you’re working with men? Anything with an empire line because they think you’re pregnant and that makes them nervous and confused. At work and for going out, men just don’t understand it when we do fashion irony. White shoes, leggings, dresses over pants, high-waisted jeans, bubble skirts, skivvies under dresses, pinafores, jumpsuits…we think ‘fun, amusing and clever’, they think, ‘Did she get dressed in the dark?’

  Back in my wardrobe, after shifting everything denim to one side for weekends, I carefully extracted anything worky. This included a few wrap dresses, a couple of pairs of pants, some tops and no suits because I didn’t own any. That would have to change, wouldn’t it?

  Next problem: what do you wear under a jacket anyway? I have many wafty tops that suddenly seemed unsuitable. Cleavage is not corporate. Neither are visible nipples.

  My first sensible purchase was a black skirt. It was unremarkable. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bought a black skirt. I’ve always gone for the pretty over the practical. The special over the staple. Next, I bought two knitted tops. I’ve never understood knits. Why wear wool when you can wear sequins? But at last I understood they’re what you wear under jackets. So I bought a jacket too. None of this shopping was remotely enjoyable. It felt a lot like buying pens before you go back to school after the summer holidays. Necessary yet slightly depressing.

  After more than a decade and a half of working among women who dressed like cast members of Cirque du Soleil and adopting that style myself (fashion forward meets fancy dress) it was a brutal shock to find myself in a sea of suits. I had fashion whiplash.

  Even so, I’d never worked in a proper grown-up office before. So at first it was a novelty to dress boringly, a bit like dressing up to play the part of an accountant in a movie about someone else’s life. Also, on the plus side, I discovered it took far less time to get ready in the morning when you didn’t have to decide whether the multi-strand necklace with gold golfballs hanging from it worked with the mesh hoodie, cargo pants and fluorescent pink slingbacks or whether in fact the sequined orange skinny scarf would look better as a belt or a headband.

  There was another thing I hadn’t realised: women bond over clothes. It can be a handy common language when we’re trying to forge a new connection. Complimenting another woman on something she’s wearing is an invitation for her to tell you a brief story about where it came from and thus open up her life to you a little bit.

  Without this default entry point into my new male colleagues’ lives, I struggled. Then I discovered that blokes do actually appreciate being asked about their ties. Every tie has an anecdote that gives you a glimpse into the wearer’s life. I never really spoke tie before, but I learned fast.

  Not for one moment during my time at Nine did anyone tell me what to wear. Nobody ever commented on it. However, I was so paranoid about giving my critics ammunition that I didn’t want to draw attention to the more out-there, frivolous, fe
male aspects of me. I was already a fish out of water. Why draw attention to my gills?

  THE SECRET IN THE GLOVE BOX

  Voicemail to nanny agency from me:

  ‘Hello, it’s Mia Freedman calling. I need to speak with someone urgently about a problem with my nanny. Can you please call me back ASAP? Because I’m freaking out. Thanks. Bye.’

  ‘I think my nanny is stealing my clothes,’ I blurted to a friend I bumped into at a restaurant. She was not a particularly close friend but I’d been sitting at dinner with Jason feeling utterly anguished and talking about it solidly since we’d arrived.

  Over the past twenty-four hours since the realisation hit, Jason and I had exhausted all angles and were now going around in small circles. I needed a fresh perspective.

  Here’s how it began.

  One morning, a couple of weeks after I started at Nine, I went looking for a skirt. It was a grey pencil skirt that had come from a friend who did PR for Portmans. She’d asked me to be a Portmans brand ambassador which just involved wearing some free Portmans clothes. Easy. Except, in fact, this is extremely difficult when you are thirty-four. Most of the things she sent—shorts, clingy dresses, see-through tops—were inappropriate for my new, jarringly conservative work environment.

  I can’t remember ever having worn a pencil skirt in my life and it probably would never have occurred to me to buy one, but suddenly this Portmans freebie was a key piece in my wardrobe. It was perfect. And it was missing. Bugger.

  I was alert but not alarmed. Losing clothes was not new to me. I had form. To say I can be a little vague about my material possessions is a kind way of putting it. The truth is I’m utterly hopeless.

  One of my favourite things to do when I have a rare spare hour on the weekend is to edit my wardrobe. I’m forever making piles of clothes to send to the alterationist, the dry-cleaner, to give away, to sell or to stash in a cupboard belonging to someone else in my house. Everyone in the family has parts of their wardrobes occupied by my clothes, squatting stubbornly and expanding into every available space. Occasionally, during an edit, these piles get mixed up and clothes meant for the dry-cleaner or storage end up at Vinnies. This is very bad. I am very careless.

  So I didn’t panic when the skirt went missing. A teeny tiny voice in my head whispered, ‘Hmmmm, timing is interesting. Fran comes, skirt goes.’ But I smothered the little voice with loud logic. ‘Why on earth would anyone want to steal a Portmans skirt?’ I reasoned to myself. Surely if you were a thief let loose in my cupboard, you’d go for the labels, wouldn’t you? And then the labels began to disappear. A few weeks later, while getting ready to go out, I went looking for a sass & bide denim jacket. Gone. Annoying, puzzling, but still no cause for a total freak-out.

  I didn’t want my nanny to be a thief. I wanted to put my fingers in my ears and loudly sing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ to drown out the sound of the mounting anecdotal evidence. And so I did. And my clothes continued to disappear. More sass & bide, jeans this time. A Collette Dinnigan top. A Joseph leather jacket. But also, confusingly, a dress from Bondi markets. A Sportsgirl pair of sandals.

  And still, I pushed it to the back of my mind. Perhaps they were all together in a pile somewhere! I also reminded myself how generous I was with Fran. I always gave her clothes and beauty products and magazines because I was forever being sent stuff and I wanted to share it.

  I was also genuinely fond of her. She had become like the little sister I never had, one of the traps and, occasionally, benefits of having a young nanny. It’s a bit like having another child. When Jamie Oliver came to town and did a series of live shows, I bought her a $150 ticket, knowing how much she loved cooking. I also gave her the afternoon off to go see him and asked my aunt to look after Coco that day as I was at work. Later, my aunt would tell me that when she arrived, Fran had been locked in the bathroom in tears after having a fight with her boyfriend on the phone. At the time, my aunt hadn’t thought much of it. But after Fran was gone and we began to unravel what had gone on when I wasn’t around, it would be yet another sign that my trusted nanny was a mess. But was she a thief?

  One day, when Fran had been with us about six months, I decided to have a baby seat fitted in her car so she could occasionally take Coco out to a playground or to the library. I had Fran follow me in her car to the baby shop where we had someone install a car seat. Afterwards, I went inside to pay while she waited by her car. ‘Put this receipt in your glove box so you have proof that the seat was installed by a registered provider,’ the salesman told me, handing me an official-looking bit of paper.

  I walked outside and as Fran was being shown how best to remove the car seat, I opened the front passenger door and flipped open the glove box to put the receipt inside. Stuffed into that very small space was a denim jacket that looked familiar. Instantly, reflexively, I closed the glove box again. Part of me wanted to delete what I’d just seen and never think about it again.

  But in that instant I knew if I didn’t look properly, I’d always wonder and by then it would be too late. So I opened the glove box again and pulled out the jacket. ‘Oh,’ I said in surprise that was part an act, part genuine. I could sense Fran behind me now, but I couldn’t bear to turn around and look into her face. Later, I’d regret this.

  ‘Isn’t this mine?’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. She replied instantly.

  ‘Yeah it is, I meant to give it back to you. I found it out the front.’

  I was overcome, but the strongest sensation I had was to get away from her. I couldn’t think straight. I needed to be alone, regroup. I wanted to vomit.

  ‘Right, I’ll see you back at the house,’ I said over my shoulder, holding my jacket as I walked quickly to my car with Coco and drove away.

  I could hardly breathe. So I did what I always do in times of extreme confusion. I called Jo to debrief.

  ‘I found my jacket stuffed in Fran’s glove box, and oh my God I think she’s stealing from me, and she said she found it out the front and was going to give it back to me, but that’s so weird and I couldn’t look at her face, and oh my God what am I going to do, and I think I might throw up and I’m totally freaked out and what do I say to her when I get home and—’

  ‘Oh fuck,’ said Jo. ‘This is bad’.

  ‘Oh, it’s soooooo bad,’ I wailed melodramatically. ‘Soooo baaaaaaad.’

  ‘Look, let’s run through this logically. Could she have found the jacket out the front like she said?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose if I was carrying it somewhere and I dropped it then it could have been somewhere other than in my closet.’

  ‘Okay, so that’s possible.’

  ‘Except I haven’t worn this jacket in ages. At least a year.’

  ‘Oh. Fuck.’

  ‘Yes, fuck. What am I going to do?’

  ‘You have to ask her more about where and when she found it. Watch her face this time when she’s speaking.’

  ‘Right, yes, good idea. I’ll do that and I’ll call you back. Stand by.’

  My hands were shaking on the steering wheel. This wasn’t about the clothes. This was about the possibility that I’d employed a thief. That the person I was entrusting with my most vulnerable and helpless possession, my baby daughter, had the kind of morality that would allow her to come into my home, accept my generosity and steal from me blindly. And then look me in the eye and lie about it.

  When I got home, Fran was already in the kitchen preparing Coco’s dinner. She seemed normal, cheerful even. This threw me because if I’d been stealing and had just been caught, I would be a mess.

  ‘So Fran, where did you say you found that jacket?’ I asked casually, unstacking the dishwasher so I had something to do with my hands while keeping a close eye on her face.

  ‘It was out in the garden near your car,’ she replied calmly. Her face revealed nothing. She met my gaze.

  ‘I was going home one day last week and I meant to give it back to you. I’m so sorry about that.’

/>   ‘Oh well, thanks for picking it up,’ I said because I didn’t know what else to say and I needed more time to think.

  I went into my room and called Jo.

  ‘All right, let’s go through this logically,’ she said in a no-nonsense way that calmed me down. For a brief moment. ‘What kind of access does she have to your wardrobe?’

  ‘Total access. To get to the bathroom where she gives Coco a bath, she has to walk past my wardrobe and you know there are no doors on the cupboards—everything is open.’

  ‘And she’s at your place a lot by herself?’

  ‘Yes, most of the time. We’re at work and it’s just her and Coco.’

  ‘Okay, back to the jacket for a sec. Is it possible she, say, got cold one day and needed to take Coco out for a walk and so she, say, borrowed the jacket without asking and forgot to return it?’

  ‘It definitely smells like her so, yes, she’s worn it. But, but…’

  I was struggling to put my finger on something that was niggling. It came to me suddenly.

  ‘It’s not like it was just flung casually on the front seat. That would have been more believable. It was the way it was stuffed into a tiny ball in the glove box. That’s what screamed “guilty” to me. It was so…furtive.

  ‘She wasn’t expecting that we’d go get the car seat installed today so when I told her to follow me in her car, she must have panicked and tried to hide it.’

  ‘It’s all pointing towards her nicking it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh nooooo,’ I wailed. ‘It can’t! She can’t be a thief! What am I going to do? What about today? Should I send her home now?’

  ‘No. Let her finish the day normally. Don’t tip her off at this stage until you’re ready to confront her. And don’t worry about Coco. She loves Coco. She may be a thief but she would never mistreat Coco.’