I don’t know who I was dressing to be when I was pregnant. I imagined that my best outfit — a black trapeze dress with a French collar and cuffs — made me look kind of like a suburban Jean Seberg, if she gave up smoking and selling newspapers, left Paris, and spent her time pouting to no one at all while slouched on the sofa watching Steve Martin movies. One of the more unfortunate outfits was a red maternity dress from ASOS with fake embroidery that draped over the bump all the way to the floor, and made me look like someone who would steal hair from your baby for a potion. There were inevitably the farmer clothes, also; overalls intended to look cute, with the effect of transforming me into someone who might drive an ornamental steam train for a living. The worst was when I didn’t have time before work to cycle through nine costumes and had to simply go to work in what looked like a child’s tank top (say, a trapeze dress that no longer reached far enough down to qualify as such) and cycling pants. Nothing felt like me. Probably because there’s nothing quite right to wear during an existential crisis. When you’re becoming a different person, there isn’t a hard you to dress as.
When my friend Marie got pregnant, she turned to the Park Slope Parents listserv — known goldmine — for maternity wear. She picked up clothing from three different moms, and with them, three different personas: Basic Mom (tees and basics), Third Tri Mom (roomy and forgiving clothes), and Sexy Mom. Sexy Mom was obviously the best.
“The massive pregnant boobs paired with the low-cut tops was quite a bit racier than my typical tank and cardigan + jeans,” she says of Sexy Mom’s wardrobe. “So basically, my identity shifted daily, depending on whose clothing I wore.”
Her teaching assistants got to know the personas, to the point that when she wore something body-hugging to work, they’d go, “That's from Sexy Mom, right?”
Why the fuck not drive that sexy bump bus, I think. Far sexier than the stretched-out-organs bus.
For my friend Camille, pregnancy was an opportunity to break from her usual style and go for some bump-squeezing Forever 21 stuff. “‘Brash, foulmouthed working class barmaid from a ‘70s or ‘80s sitcom’ is one of my major style moods, so I was channeling that I think,” she says. “I was working with all these dudes at a startup, so Earth Mother wasn't gonna be the look ever and I'm not one for sweats/baggy clothes.”
There also those who endorse the “tactical bow,” I’ll call it — a bow placed over the bump not for the aesthetic of looking like a doll or a pillowcase, but for the utility, on a crowded subway train of YES IT IS INDEED A BUMP BEST FOR US ALL IF I SIT.
Jenny True, who is a friend and also the author of You Look Tired: An Excruciatingly Honest Guide to New Parenthood, got a box of clothes from a buddy, none of which were her usual style. "They looked super cute on me, which was confusing. I was like, maybe I'm not Sporty Spice! Maybe I wear leopard-spotted cardigans, neon-pink-and-black tops, and mauve '70s-style sun dresses!"
Who am I? is the question. Also, have I been wrong about myself? And when I thought this as a person chugging into a different station in life, I didn’t think it in a Sweet Home Alabama-type way — it wasn’t about am I a cool mom, am I a working mom, am I a city girl or a ‘burbs lady, am I a mama, a mum, a mooms — but more as the David Byrne question of, well, how did I get here?
Franz Kafka never carried a baby, but he did believe himself to be inescapably ugly (who among us…?), and, without pathologizing him, his work is obviously very useful for thinking about temporary, accidentally-dressing-like-a-farmer bouts of alienation.
In Kafka’s short story ‘The Fasting Artist,’ a performer finds that crowds no longer value his talent the way they once did. He is moved from the center of a circus to its perimeter, until he is totally forgotten. One day someone realizes, looking at his dirty cage, which is full of straw, that he is in fact still in there, doing his fast. “When on earth are you going to stop?” a circus overseer asks him. The fasting artist tells the people that “I always wanted you to admire my fasting.”:
“And we do admire it.” said the overseer obligingly. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” the fasting artist said. “All right, we don’t admire it then,” said the overseer. “But we shouldn’t we admire it?”
The artist explains that “I could never find the nourishment I liked. Had I found it, believe me, I would have eaten my fill just like you and everyone else.”
WE CANNOT HELP LOOKING LIKE THE PREGNANT NOUVELLE VAGUE.
The strangeness of maternity wear, so often borrowed from someone else, or at least the trappings of a person you will only briefly be, briefly cracks the door open on our otherwise very dull displays of personality. These wardrobes transmit ideas about what kind of pregnant person we think we might be, and what kind of parent, usually incorrectly. As Ann Patchett put it when looking at her belongings during a clean out of her home: "I had miscalculated the tools of adulthood when I was young, or I had miscalculated the kind of adult I would be."
I find it a bit touching, to find yourself connected to someone else whose denim shortalls you have inherited for a passing phase (I’ve loaned a giant poncho to new parents, and certainly imagined I was passing much more along than a picnic blanket with a head hole cut out). At the same time, the designated “maternity wear” options — the Hatch and Madewell maternity getup (what is this) — out there seem terribly blank of personality, built for a mannequin with a belly and no opinions. It is the same lie perpetrated by Big Travel Clothes, a wrinkle-free future of navy and bone, where you never drop your phone in the toilet or stress a button to the point it flies off.
In ‘The Fasting Artist,’ the dead faster is replaced by a virile panther who knows who he is and what he wants, and the crowd cannot get enough:
“that noble body, furnished almost to bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom itself around with it too; somewhere in its jaws it seemed to be hidden; and the joy of life glowed so fiercely from the furnace of his throat that the onlookers could scarcely stand up against it. But they mastered their weakness, surrounded the cage, and simply refused to be dragged away.”
How it happened
Scout, always on the lookout for a bigger home with a backyard: “I like this house because the sky is blue and there’s no trash.”
Goodies
The Ann Patchett essay is of course very good.
I have an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books about the way that self vs. other is explored in Jon Klassen’s latest children’s book.
Alison Bechdel is a dharma bum!
Related: WHAT IS A SUMMIT?
“However quantifiable weather may be, no calculation or map can provide a substitute for an individual’s experience any given day. There may be as many perceptions of a sunny, 63° day as there are people, but even the broad consensus of how that sunny, 63° day feels will differ greatly by region” — Kyle Paoletta on weather apps in Real Life
This man duster-bustering up the seeds from an endangered Australian flower made me happy:
And the photo I will link to here instead of embedding is really something!!! Scroll down to the one of the man lying under the leaves. The photographer is Florence Goupil, who photographed the indigenous Shipibo-Konibo people in Peru, who have been using forest medicine to deal with a terrible COVID-19 outbreak, having been essentially abandoned by their government.
Lastly: “She’s arrived, my grandmother’s daughters said every summer when it bloomed, keeping vigil from the dining room. We did the same for my aunt when she passed away, planting flowers in her name—she’s out there in the garden now. There is an unspoken belief in reincarnation among the women in my family. We all come back as flowers in the end.” — Jessi Jezewska Stevens in TheNew Yorker
Thank you for reading Kafka’s BB! <3 <3