I’m remaking my wardrobe and I promise, I promise, NEXT POST we’ll get to the specifics on that.
But first, I want to talk about getting older. (Not that I’m really that old.)
But before I was a mom, I saw mothers as “others.” I never understood the draw of momfluencers or of having children in general. Mom life seemed so boring to me. I wanted to see and read about trendy, self-indulgent topics like minimalism, self-care, or being a #girlboss. Moms didn’t have the same glamor as childless 20-somethings who traveled, socialized, wrote about self-discovery, and always looked put together.
(Self-care and focusing on yourself is important, but those things look different when you’ve got little kids underfoot. I don’t soak in nightly hot baths with candles these days, for example.)
Anyways, I grew up and caught baby fever and now I have two kids. So obviously my opinions on children changed.
But after having little E, I realized that my opinions on moms hadn’t changed much despite becoming one.
It happened when kiddo was about eight months old. I was looking at the bathroom mirror while applying face cream. Are those wrinkles at the corners of my eyes? Startled, I leaned in close to the mirror. Indeed, there were a few fine lines. My family tends to age in their eyes before anywhere else, and I have a very squinty-eyed smile.
Already?
I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. I felt like I had lost something irreplaceable—something that I didn’t know the value of until the exact moment when I no longer had it.
But what was it? What had been lost, slowly, during the long nights rocking the baby to sleep, with the physical stress of pregnancy and nursing, as a natural consequence of hitting my mid-20s (although in my mind, I was still a teenager)?
I saw myself for a moment from my own perspective five years earlier. To begin with, I had no exciting career—a true disappointment in the eyes of fresh-out-of-college Claire. A few stretch marks hidden below the waistline of my jeans. Trips to Europe exchanged for furnishing a nursery and adding baby to our health insurance. And now, despite my rigorous skincare routine of sun protection, exfoliating and moisturizing, I was aging too. A proper boring momfluencer was exactly what I turned out to be.
How far the mighty have fallen!
And how revered youth is in our society.
Only when we see the faint suggestion of those first few wrinkles, or perhaps that first grey hair or stiff joint, do we realize just how fleeting, superficial and yet all-important youth is. Paired with my recently becoming a mom—when my child became the center of my world—I suddenly felt like a side character, in my own life and in greater society.
I also understood why people went to such lengths to appear younger through their dress, fitness, Botox, etc. Headlines that advertised celebrity secrets to everlasting youth, or clickbait photos of said female celebrities rocking bikinis on vacation. Particularly as women, it seems that much of our value in society is lost once we have children, and especially after we pass childbearing age.
But that’s not a society I want to live in. So whilst it was high time to buy a vitamin C serum, it was also time to do some unlearning of the cultural values I grew up with. And some relearning of values that respect and support women along every season of their journeys through life. It’s a work in progress, but a worthwhile one.
All this to say that part of remaking my wardrobe, for me, has been accepting that I am as old as I am—not a high school or college kid, not a hip 20-something out on the town, but a mom of two living a simple stay-at-home life in our small house on a quiet road in my hometown. We live counterculturally, in many ways, and I need a modest, functional wardrobe for that life, not the one I dreamed of living five years ago.
My 20s have involved a lot of hard, quiet, reflective work towards getting comfortable with myself and the realities of my past, present circumstances and relationships. But it’s good work–the most important work I can do, I think.