Over there in my sidebar of yearly goals I had listed the very vague idea of “reclaiming my personal style.” As I wrote earlier, I was once known for how I dressed. Then a traumatic decade knocked me off my feet, and when I got back up and looked around, I was no longer a punky young adult, but a 30 year old mom with a mom body, and left at a bit of a loss.
I’ve struggled to really know what to do with my new self. I want to look stable and responsible, like someone you’d leave a child with, but I don’t want to look like a carbon copy of every mom everywhere in a uniform of sensible shoes and unflattering jeans. I don’t want to hamper my ability to play or lift Atti’s wheelchair out of the car, but I don’t want to wear sneakers and T-shirts everywhere I go. I don’t want to look like I’m trying desperately to pass as 22, but I also don’t want to careen headlong into Talbot’s and Chico’s and the flouncy uniform of sassy women in their 60’s.
I’m still carrying every bit of weight I gained four years ago when I was pregnant with Atticus, and for all that time I’ve stayed stuck in the new mom rut of yoga pants and food stained T-shirts because I let myself believe that the first step in getting myself together would be losing weight. And until that step was accomplished, nothing else was worth pursuing. I wouldn’t want to buy clothes at this size, that would mean I was staying this way. I wouldn’t want to learn how to do my makeup or hair in a manner that worked with my rounder face, because it wouldn’t be staying that way. And time ticked by and here I still am, with my larger size and rounder face and food stained T-shirts and yoga pants.
I so should have known better. If infertility taught me ANYTHING, it taught me that you do not put your life off until something you can’t always control happens. I lost a dear friend a while back and if she taught me anything, it’s that you do not postpone joy. (Also, if you have chance to spend time with someone you love, you take it. But that’s a conversation for another day.)
So, maybe I’ll eventually lose some of this weight, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll get really fit and still be rounder than I was when I was 20. That’s kind of how these things tend to go. But in the meantime I am going to stop looking like a slob, and I’m going to rediscover the joy in applying my creativity to how I present myself to the world.
Here’s what “reclaim my style” means to me now:
Get healthy – physically, mentally, emotionally
Learn how to apply makeup in a way that doesn’t hide my face but shares who I really am
Learn how to style my hair in something besides “disheveled”
Embrace my figure – wherever it is on the curvy continuum – and dress in a way that makes me feel good.
Take time and care with the impression I present to the world
How this will all be applied will be a bit of a journey. I have a lot to learn about all these things, but also a lot to learn about how I want to go about it. Like most modern women I have complicated feelings about beauty and efforts to claim it, and above all I want this exercise to be about being more authentic, not just obeying whatever an expert tells me or spending a ton of money. I want it to be an expression of how I live and what is important to me, taking joy in a creative approach to every aspect of my life, and joy out of engaging with the world.
