One writer’s approach to fashion and motherhood.
Embracing Your Body After Baby: How to Dress When You’re Postpartum
The lyrics of an early noughties Britney Spears song drift through my mind as I stare at my new postpartum frame in the full-length mirror. I’m not a girl / Not yet a woman / All I need is time / A moment that is mine / While I’m in-between.
In the first few weeks after giving birth to my daughter, my body seemed to evolve on a daily basis—shrinking, shedding water, developing an impressive double-D decolletage—after which it settled into a semi-permanent state of in-between. While I was lucky enough to recover from my delivery fairly quickly, a genetic anomaly (i.e., Emily Ratajkowski in a postnatal sexy cardi) I’m not. Fifteen stubborn pounds have taken up indefinite residence on my body, converging in the form of a jello-like floaty around my abdominal area that appears to have no plans of departing. After weeks of attempting to evict it through a variety of restrictive measures, I’ve been forced to come to terms with the fact there is nothing I can do but wait and let nature take its course. For now, I’m in a transitional stage: no longer pregnant, not yet my old self. Like Britney, all I need is time.
And yet, I want to shop. Between the pandemic and the pregnancy, I have invested a record low into my wardrobe over the past year, channeling all of my consumer energy into strollers, swaddles, and every overpriced baby gimmick under the sun. Meanwhile, my closet is practically frozen in the pre-pandemic era of yesteryear (i.e., 2019): stacks of jeans mock me from the top shelf with their teeny-tiny glory while dresses and skirts hang, untouched, waiting for a coming-out party that is not yet on the calendar. The only active sections are the pajama drawer and my burgeoning leggings collection, which seems to have tripled over the past years. (Luckily, I now live in Los Angeles, the capital of athleisure.)
I yearn to go out and buy myself a new wardrobe–or, rather, five pairs of high-waisted jeans–but the pragmatist in me will not stand for it. And so, I reach out to a few fellow new mothers to see how they are navigating this sartorially perplexing time. As it turns out, my deep desire for buttons and zippers is not uncommon. “I can’t wait for the day to not see an elastic waistband,” says Vogue Mexico & Latin America European Editor Eugenia Gonzalez. Having given birth to her second child seven months ago, she still hasn’t done much shopping for her postnatal frame. “Postpartum, I feel that my body is not mine. It takes me a long time to get it back,” she says, noting that it took her almost ten months to feel like herself after the birth of her first child. She was far better prepared the second time around: instead of stressing about weight loss, she took care of her mental and physical health by eating postpartum-specific meals (as inspired by Heng Ou’s The First Forty Days), which she found to be a game-changer. “I felt an immense difference than after my first birth. I never got baby blues, no depression, not even crying. Hormonally, I felt really balanced.”
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Marina Khorosh
