Wearing them, I felt a kind of semblance of the maternal embrace Mom had raised us with.
In the Midst of IVF Treatment, I Turned To My Mom’s Maternity Dresses
My mother is the opposite of a hoarder. Instead of cultivating mass ephemera, she’s obsessed with throwing everything away. We used to have a family joke that if you left any article of clothing in a closet for more than a year, you shouldn’t expect to see it again—except perhaps, at the Goodwill where it had been donated. This was particularly bothersome because my mother wore great clothes in her day. At her debs (the Irish version of prom) she looked like Elizabeth Taylor, decked out in a white gown she had made herself and covered with daisy appliqués. One of my favorite photos has her performing in a cabaret with nothing on but black tights and the perfect 70s scooped neck T-shirt. Emblazoned across her décolletage in sparkling sequins was the name of the club. I used to be so mad that she hadn’t thought of me, her future daughter, when she got rid of that shirt. I would have worn it to everything.
There were five dresses, however, that Mom never parted with and they took on a mythical reverence in our home. Dad bought them for her while traveling in Cape Town in the mid ‘80s, and she wore them throughout both of her pregnancies with my sister and me. No one knows if they were originally designed to be maternity dresses, but they feature empire waists and long flowing skirts perfect for accommodating a growing bump. Each of the dresses is a vibrant cotton, though my favorite has always been the mustard yellow one with black piping. The busts are embroidered with intricate stitching and the sleeves balloon out from shoulder to elbow. When I was little they reminded me of the high waisted gowns Olivia Hussey wore in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and I spent endless hours flinging myself around our playroom in them pretending that I too was the lovelorn daughter of the House of Capulet.
Once I became a teenager, I couldn’t really wear the dresses anymore without someone asking me if I was pregnant. An empire waist can be tricky to pull off, and mostly you need height to do so—something that, at 5’3, I lack. So Mom packed the dresses away in tissue paper with a hazy smile on her face, telling my sister and me that they were there for “when the time comes.”
This year those maternity-adjacent dresses have been on my mind quite a bit, especially since it seems they’ve come back into fashion. The printed cotton and long hems gives the frocks an almost hipster/Amish appeal, or what fashionistas have coined “cottagecore.” It would be easy to picture Mom’s dresses on the runway of a Batsheva show or in a Taylor Swift music video, complete with a crown of braided hair, and some leather ankle boots perfectly buffed save a few clumps of mud.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Lacy Warner
