Wardrobe Imaginings

I need a wardrobe intervention.  I need Stacy and Clinton to swoop in with their $5,000 and save me.  This fact shames me, though, because I used to pride myself on being someone who would've never needed their help.  I used to style myself quite well, actually.

Have you heard of or followed anyone who's done the 30 for 30 project (tagged #30x30 on Twitter)?  Long story short, you choose 30 items from your wardrobe (not including shoes, handbags, and other accessories) and mix those items and only those items for 30 days.

I love this idea - what a challenge, right?  So I got to thinking that I would love to do this but then I realized two things:

1 - I would need clothes that fit in order to do this, and

2 - I probably do 10x10 already, meaning that I think I wear the same 10 items of clothes every two weeks, basically.

I don't have a lot of functioning clothing right now.  Most of what fit the last two winters is now too big.  I have to wear a belt on my pants nearly every day and it's cinched so much that the strap is through the second belt loop, by my left hip, almost around to my back.  And it's the only belt I own.  I own NO skirts that fit (how did that happen??) and only a couple of workable dresses.  I only have a few sweaters and no long sleeve button-down shirts, just short-sleeve ones.

I have an ugly pair of black loafers that aren't even comfortable, a pair of black shoes I wore while pregnant because they offered great arch support, and two pairs of black mary janes.  I have many, many more summer shoes, but the days are frigid and piled high with snow lately so I'm not about to wear flats (and I don't like the look of flats with socks and I'm generally too lazy to carry a pair of shoes to work).

I own one true pair of heels - a really nice looking high-heel black mary jane-ish pair of Isaac Mizrahi for Target.  My new hairdresser is tall but is always wearing heels and I said to her a couple of months ago that I only owned one pair and hadn't worn them in a few years.  She laughed, looked at me and said, "Seriously?  Do you need me to tell you where to go buy more?"  Come to think of it, I do have a few dressy pairs but I never wear those either.

I need wardrobe rehab.  My wardrobe is sad and in no way reflects how I feel about myself right now.  It actually reflects how I felt after putting weight on during and after grad school, which was sad and embarrassed.  Now, of course, I know that I had developed a thyroid problem.  Of course, I also wasn't eating well and was completely sedentary.  Now that I'm medicating my thyroid, eating a bit better and a bit more active (although mostly because I play with Nate and walk the dog, so nothing big deal), weight has come off and continues to come off, albeit slowly.

About six years ago, I had a wardrobe I loved.  Gap jeans, NY&Co sweaters, DSW shoes, Target odds and ends, Kohl's shirts.  Everything fit and I felt attractive in it.  Then the weight started coming back on and the clothes got tighter and tighter, until I had to put them away and buy new clothes.  I didn't feel good about needing to buy those new clothes so I probably put minimal effort into choosing them.

So now I'm left feeling unexcited to get dressed, every single day.  The only exceptions are the days I get to wear something that fits (some pairs of my jeans or this one pair of wide-leg pinstriped trousers I have for work).  And, of course, when we're barely able to pay the bills, going clothes shopping isn't even a non-priority; it's simply an impossibility.  I want to remix, but it's like trying to mix with broken records.  My clothes, plainly, do not work.

And I'm still hoping to lose more weight - hopefully another 15 - 20 pounds (which is a crazy small amount for me to even consider because when I was over 100 pounds overweight, I would get so aggravated at people who talked about needing to lose 15 pounds).  Losing even 20 pounds will still leave me 1 - overweight and 2 - at a weight higher than my adult low, but I'm okay with that.  I want to find a weight where it takes me a little bit of effort to stay there (can't pig out daily, have to make sure I get my fruits and veggies, have to be at least a little bit active) but that doesn't require the four-day-a-week-three-hours-at-a-time gym routine I had going when I was a size 12/14 (my smallest adult size).

This is me at that size:

I don't think I "look like" a size 12/14.  If I saw that girl, I'd think she was a size 10, maybe an 8 (if not sitting down and so smushing my hips out to the sides).  Maybe I'm crazy or deluded, but that's how it feels to me and what I learned from being that size is that the number on my pants really doesn't matter to me.  I always thought that was bullshit, but it's not.  I know now what it feels like to be happy in my pants.  (Wait, that doesn't sound quite how I mean it. Ha.)  What I mean is that I know how I feel on the inside when I'm happy with myself and when I'm not; I don't need to look at the tag on my pants and have that determine my happiness.

I've been looking at a few personal style blogs and have been getting really, truly inspired by them.  These ladies put together really great outfits and they aren't spending hundreds of dollars on every single item.  Similar to how I'm building my own personal cooking style by first following other people's recipes and tweaking them in time, as I grow more comfortable putting food together, I think I'm going to do the same thing with clothing.  I might try copying some other folks' outfits or styling choices at first so that in time, I can learn how *I* like my clothing to look and begin to build my sense of style back up (I used to have one - a pretty decent one, actually - even at my heaviest).

Here are some of the personal style bloggers I'm loving right now:

Kendi Everyday (she runs the whole 30 for 30 Remix Challenge)

Archives

Miss Vinyl Ahoy

Snappy and Savvy

Law Mama

By Hillary (I love love love that she takes her pictures in the library and I have been thinking obsessively about her red sweater from this post since she posted it)

So that's the way I'm headed.  I'm hoping the scale keeps moving down.  As soon as I have some expendable income, I'll be buying a few clothing items (especially pants) and I'm going to continue to go through the containers of "too small" clothing I have to see if anything newly fits.  As time passes, I'll continue to add to and edit my wardrobe until I get to a point where I can do a 30x30 and challenge myself to dress creatively and, most importantly, dress like myself.

Got any good personal style blogs you want to recommend?

Dealing With Post-Pregnancy

Many women are used to living in bodies that are outside the perceived “norm” (if we want to avoid even trying to define what the “norm” is anyway).  But there are times when our bodies seem to intersect.

For example, it’s generally assumed that all brides will try to lose weight.  It’s just the accepted norm, in my experience.  If I had a friend or coworker getting married, she was probably talking about her diet and the boot camp classes at her gym.  I didn’t do that, though.  Actually, I had to exchange my wedding dress for the next larger size a couple of months before the wedding because I had gained weight since buying it.  I didn’t try to gain weight, but I was stressed due to graduate school and I’m a stress eater.  But that’s a different discussion.

Weddings are one of those experiences where people sometimes have behavioral and physical expectations of others.  Another one of those experiences?  Pregnancy.

It seems fairly simple, right?  A woman gets pregnant, the baby grows, the woman gains weight, her shape changes, and so on.  We’re all roughly familiar with the expectations of the process.  If you read enough articles or blogs written by pregnant or formerly pregnant women, you also learn that people feel free to comment (often!) about the size of a pregnant woman’s belly.

Even that, in a way, is the norm.  But that wasn’t my experience and, even now as my son nears three months of age, I’m still trying to fully process my pregnancy experience.

I didn’t have the big belly.  I’ve been overweight or obese most of my life, yet during pregnancy, I didn’t gain much weight.  By the time I went in to give birth, I had gained 10 pounds.  My son weighed 8 pounds, so I was back at my pre-birth weight before I even came home from the hospital.  I was healthy throughout the pregnancy and my son is perfectly healthy, so it’s not that anything was wrong – but by the reactions of people throughout my pregnancy, you might think so.

Read the rest here...

What happened to my girls?

Warning: this post is about boobs.  Wanna read about boobs?  Then keep on goin'...

source

As I've mentioned a few times before (especially in regards to breastfeeding), I had a breast reduction/lift when I was 30.  Before the surgery, I was a DDD, albeit a slightly deflated one due to some weight loss.  But when I lost weight, I never really lost much from my boobs.

When I went in for the surgery, my surgeon told me I would end up being a large C.  This sounded magical to me.  It never happened, though.  I ended up being a D cup and that was fine by me.  They always fit my frame and because they were lifted, I could find bras that fit (although, like most other women, it still wasn't easy to find those elusive bras that truly fit just right).

When I got pregnant, I thought, "Oh well, there goes the work I had done." But, interestingly, my bra size didn't change.  I didn't have to buy any new or special bras.  But in a way I did because the ones I owned were all dying.  I didn't buy new ones because I assumed I'd have to due to a size increase at some point, but it never happened.

So after Nate was born, it was time to buy some new bras.  My size hadn't changed so I ordered some online and that was that.  They were delivered and were really pretty and I was happy.

Until I realized they were fitting oddly.  The cups were gaping.  I could fit my hand inside the cup with my boob in there.  I thought, "Okay.  That's new."

So on a hunch I went shopping and tried on a C cup... and it fit.  Perfectly.

So let me get this straight.  My boobs did not grow during pregnancy but still went through the post-pregnancy shrinkage, even though my milk didn't come in?

What?

But, yeah.  Such is the case.  I'm actually not upset about this; really I'm just surprised, and kind of amused.

So if anyone finds a lost cup size wandering around, don't worry about it; I'm okay.

Navel Gazing

Nate's belly button stub fell off last weekend, so I've been cleaning his belly button every day as it continues to heal.  As I clean Nate, I always talk to him and narrate what I'm doing (eventually this will help him learn the parts of his body).  The other day, as I was dabbing his belly button with a cotton ball dipped in water, I said, "This is where you were attached to mommy..." and then I burst into tears.  It's still so incredible that he came from me.  Obviously, he came from the hubby as well, but I'm not sure it won't ever be amazing to me that my body incubated, nourished, and supported him until he was ready to join us.

I have been known to be a bit overly introspective - to be a cliché "navel gazer" - but I have literally spent time pondering my navel, specifically because it's fake.

Yes, I have a fake belly button.

When I had my tummy tuck, part of the excess skin they removed was the area including my belly button.  As an adult, we don't need a belly button but we feel weird without one, so the surgeons create a belly button in the newly tight belly during the tummy tuck procedure.

I've often pondered the significance of having your navel removed - of having that place where you were first nourished and supported by your mother removed.  As I thought about it, the more it made me feel disconnected and almost less than human as I no longer had any physical proof of this most primal connection.

Of course having a fake belly button doesn't truly mean that my relationship with my mother or my relationship with the natural order of things is different.  Those relationships are what they always were.  But now, as I gaze at Nate's navel every day, I find myself so thankful it's there - that I can look at it and remember all the time he spent inside me and all the thinking I did about his well-being every day.

Am I crazy?  Do other mothers stare at their babies' belly buttons and think about how it represents their point of connection?

I'd post a picture of Nate's belly button, but he's snoozing right now and I don't want to wake him up to sign the picture waiver.  (You know, in case he finds the picture embarassing later in life, I've got to cover my arse.)  ;)

I don't want to pop.

Sometimes I think I shouldn't read BabyCenter at all, but I can't help myself.  I get an email every morning with the updated posts for the groups I belong to (May 2010 Moms and Plus-Size Moms).  Six to eight weeks ago it was tough because everyone was talking about morning sickness and some members would write good-bye posts after having a miscarriage.  I wasn't feeling ill, so I was convinced something wasn't right.  I'm glad for all the information I have from reading these pages, but a lot of it just doesn't fit me.

Like now everyone is concerned about popping - you know, when you go from not looking pregnant or just looking like you put weight on to looking actually pregnant because your belly is now "popped" out.

Yeah.  Reading the word "popped" makes me gag a little; I don't know why.  It probably goes back to my whole thing about being grossed out by pregnant bellies.  So far I can't tell if my belly has changed at all.  My pants still all fit, so I'm going to guess no (unless somehow my ass is shrinking, lol).  I like that right now my pregnancy is still my news and that only people "in the know" - well, know.  Eventually it'll become everyone's business, in a way, and I think I'm nervous about that.

When you're fat growing up, your body already feels like everyone's business.  Everyone in your life (teachers, parents, doctors, strangers) feel like they have the authority to tell you what you could do to lose weight.  As you get older, peers and strangers feel the authority to yell mean things at you on the street or from their cars.  I know that not only fat people have to deal with this, but I feel like it's harder to know that a wolf whistle is sarcastic, not complimentary and that having people fling Jenny Craig brochures at you from a car is different than having someone ask you for your number.  I know we all deal with unwanted advances or comments, but... there's just something about it being a critique on who you are every day.

So, partly, I feel a bit removed from the pregnancy experience.  I'm not concerned about stretch marks - I've had them for as long as I can remember.  I'm not concerned about sagging skin; I already have it and have dealt with worse, too.  I'm not looking forward to a belly pop because I've never seen an expanding belly as a good thing; it was always a sign of failure before. 

But then there's this: I'm not petrified of gaining weight because I've seen the scale go up before (and certainly recently) and now I feel like for the first time in my life, I don't have to care if it goes up because it needs to.  I'm obviously paying attention to how much it goes up (no weight gained yet) and I'm mindful of what I eat, but I don't feel this dread or, alternately, an exhilaration about finally "being allowed" to gain weight that I see other women seemingly revel in.  I think I can write more in depth on that another time, though, because I see a lot of layers to this particular aspect of the experience.

I like my not-so-secret secret pregnancy right now.  I can think about all of these things and not actually be asked to answer for them yet.