postpartum dressing – Mumz in the hood

Autumn is now upon us, and part of me is very glad. As we make the switch from tropical to Tundra I can legitimately hide my mum-gunt back under a series of extremely baggy sweaters. Over the past six months I have been suffering with a bout of body loathing. Well loathing is quite a strong word. It’s more like the way you might feel about a pair of saggy old jeans. They are comfy, they get the job done, but you wouldn’t wear them on a night out where you saw actual PEOPLE. My shape completely changed after having Bella. Specifically the saggy, recently vacated basement flat that is my belly, the flaccid spaniels ears that are my desiccated boobs, and my now ACTUAL child bearing hips. And let’s dwell on the bosom area for one moment. Before I got pregnant my general maxim was “if it’s a handful it’s a waste”. At school I was a late developer, in fact I wore a VEST til I was fifteen, only succumbing to a bra due to heavy locker room disdain. And then it was basically pouring two fried eggs into a lacy crop top from Tammy Girl. But when I was pregnant and then breastfeeding I suddenly developed enormous veiny barrage balloons for boobs. The muffin bra became a thing, as they bulged uncontrollably out of the side of my normal A Cup. Then I stopped breastfeeding and BOOM. All gone. And not only that, they are smaller than before. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE? There was nothing there anyway.

But for the first year post partum, I didn’t really mind how much my body had altered. Partly that’s because I was still in awe of its ability to grow a whole human inside it and then push her out. And when you are the proud owner of a newborn no one expects you to look all abs and sinew, like a hungry Madonna. They are just impressed that you are a) upright, and b) not openly weeping. Also, adjusting to life with said tiny creature took up all my attention for the first year. I didn’t have any energy to care about what I looked like. If I made it out of my milk-encrusted sweatpants and brushed my hair then that was a GOOD DAY. But 20 months later my body has changed irrevocably and I have just realised that it’s never going to SNAP back to what it once was. It seems to be carrying a permanent muscle memory of being pregnant, like a fat ghost. And I am struggling a bit with that.

So I am now party to a somewhat unforgiving internal monologue. Things I now believe people are thinking when I walk past:

Is she pregnant again? (That’s a new one, thanks.)

What’s that coming over the hill, is it a monster, is it a monster?

Why are those girls (my mates) out with their mum (me)?

Wow, it looks like Lindsey ATE Lindsey (don’t tell me you haven’t thought this about Christina Aguilera on a number of occasions).

She’s big boned, or (worse) statuesque.

I do recognise that I am not obese, and my BMI is in a healthy range. I think it’s more the change than the absolute that’s sending me into a spiral of self-doubt. I feel like a Russian doll version of myself. The old me is in there somewhere, desperate to get out but not desperate enough to stop stuffing croissants in her mouth like some kind of rabid pastry hamster. And this is worse in summer. In the depths of the British winter, as I push the pram round the tundra that is Tooting Common, the baggy sweat shirt can hide a multitude of gunt-based sins. I can wrestle my stomach into a pair of skinny jeans and vacuum pack it down. I could be ANY size under there. But SUMMER, season of tanned nubile flesh, floaty dresses, tiny shorts and (shudder) CROP TOPS, brings me out in chills (ironically). I now hate fabric too ephemeral to hold my mum-pouch in check. The one sartorial saving grace this summer has been the ascendance of the BUFFET DRESS. This is the fashion equivalent of a marquee and comes in a variety of patterns and lengths, but all reassuringly tent-like.

So until I a) put down the pastries, b) get some masochistic PT to get me to do more exercise by shaming me with their rock hard abs, or c) accept my changed body for what it is, I will instead do d) wear every buffet dress going and fake it before I make it.

So it seems that the great British summertime, that fickle friend, may finally have arrived. I say this whilst crossing all my digits, as I am well aware that in the UK we can go from bikinis to galoshes in the space of 24 hours (obviously I will not be wearing a bikini. No one deserves to see that. There isn’t enough mind bleach in existence to erase such an image). So as the mercury hits 24 degrees I have unveiled my pallid, nay blue flesh. My legs look like uncooked turkey thighs complete with thickets of unshaved hair. Despite my hirsute unreadiness I have always LOVED summers and I particularly enjoy them in London. They are so very different to the summers of my ‘youf’ spent up t’north.

In SW17 you know summer has landed when you head to the common and there are a wealth of neon inflatable chairs, far too many people playing that inexplicable game where you lob sticks at other sticks and some dude flying a drone, who you suspect is somehow looking up girls’ skirts. In Blackpool we knew summer had arrived when we got sent to Gran’s house to play next to the canal with the feral cats whilst she cooked us liver and chips in Trex followed by a generous helping of Neapolitan ice cream. And maybe if we were lucky after all that we got a trip to Kwik Save followed by a game of Spot The Ball.

Summer with a baby is fraught with all sorts of new conundrums. Foremost amongst them is protecting Bella from the sun. Being out in it is fine for my chamois leather skin (when I am proper old I want to resemble a shrivelled tan handbag) but she must be shielded at all costs from the FIREY ORB. Added to that she has a vampiric reaction to sunshine, shrinking back in her pram seat, squeezing her eyes shut and growling like an angry Shih Tzu. Growing up in the 1980s we had a somewhat laissez-faire attitude to being in the sun. My parents used to lather themselves up with sunflower oil and vinegar before hitting the beach; yes they were one piece of tinfoil away from actually frying themselves. Sun tan cream was for pussies. We even had a sunbed in THE HOUSE. Once on a family holiday to Spain I burnt my shins so badly I could see my face in them. I am determined this fate will not befall Bella, so I smother her in layers of Factor 50 until she looks luminous. Her big-gal pram also has a woefully inadequate sunshade (it seems to cover her forehead and that’s about your lot) so I end up darting swiftly from shadow to shadow like I am the only player in some weird, shade hunting game. When we go on holiday and it gets even hotter I am going to have to pour her into a head-to-toe wetsuit, like a neoprene baby ninja.

As well as what to dress Bella in, another issue is what on earth to dress my post partum body in when the sun comes out. Straight after having Bella I lost loads of weight quickly as the water left my body and I deflated like a sad lilo at the end of the holidays. But then I reached equilibrium and since then I can’t seem to shift the post labour “gunt” (an unholy union of gut and… yep, I don’t have to say it), a wobbly, pendulous, needs vacuum packing into jeans, gunt. What to dress this new body part in when the temperature soars is a problem. Thus far my answer has been dungarees and I own ten near identical pairs with varying leg lengths. I basically have the wardrobe of a 90s children’s TV presenter. I half expect Ed the Duck to launch out of my closet every time I open it to bemoan my lack of sartorial choice. I tried to buy a playsuit, the slightly flashier cousin of the dungaree, to hilariously awful results. I ended up looking like a big fat baby with a camel’s hoof.

summer dressing — The only dress I have found that successfully conceals the ‘gunt’

Then there is summer’s rampant insect population, all of which seem to make a beeline (see what I did there) for Bella. The worst are those limp bluebottles the size of baby birds who act like they have had a few too many tequilas, crashing into everything and sliding to the floor in a heap. And then there are the bees. We have all seen My Girl. Macaulay Culkin’s character was killed BY A BEE. Our flat also seems to have been hit by a coordinated attack from a moth army, who, when not eating holes in my favourite items of clothing, are leaping out from behind the nursery curtains, flapping their massive moth wings with what seems like gusto and scaring the bejesus out of me. This all means constant vigilance when it comes to protecting Bella from these vicious and ubiquitous creatures. (Thank god I am not raising a baby in Australia, or somewhere with ACTUAL insects, I would probably lose my mind.)

So although I bloody love summer, I fear that I may spend this year in a state of high alert, ready to leap into action. Ready to apply sun cream, dive for the shade or defend from rogue insects at any given moment. Summer, summer, summertime, time to sit back and unwind? Not so much.

Tag: postpartum dressing

I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly (Destiny’s Child)

Summer, summer, summertime (DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince)