I know you're mine all mine, but you look so good it hurts sometimes

I went shopping for some new fall clothes this morning. When you decide to stay at home with your kids, especially if you worked outside the home before that decision, you find you need a new wardrobe. Before I chose to be a domestic goddess (yes, that is how I prefer to refer to myself today) I worked at a school so my wardrobe was basically career clothes, blazers, skirts, and the like. Not very useful for hanging around the house all day with an infant who seems determined to make sure you smell like sour milk before the morning is half gone. So I was left with basically the clothes that I used to wear on the weekends. These were not the nicest clothes one had ever seen. When you dress up all week the last thing you want to do is dress up all weekend. Hence VERY casual everyday once I started staying home. Then I got pregnant again and so maternity clothes became my everyday wear. My maternity clothes were on the whole very cool. They have some great styles now, even better during my second pregnancy than my first, and since basically all I could wear was maternity clothes, I bought some very cool ones. But after you have the baby the LAST thing you want to wear is maternity clothes and so I was back to my old clothes.

Slowly over time, since as an added bonus when you stay at home you have almost no budget to buy clothes anyway, I had built up a farily decent wardrobe. But when I started going through them last spring to kind of take out what I no longer wear, I got very depressed. These clothes were not ME. They were usually stuff I could find on sale (not always the best way to express yourself through style) or stuff someone else bought me. And if there is one thing I can say about my identity, it's that the people who normally buy me clothes for gifts have very little idea who I am, and are generally not interested in finding out. They have their own idea of who I am that they formed when I was about 6 and it hasn't really changed since that time. Suffice to say that I realized that most of my clothes were not flattering, not exciting, and not at all reflective of who I am or would like to be. My aunt, who has been just incredible to me this past year, gave me a sizeable amount of money for my birthday so I decided to basically buy an entire summer wardrobe and throw out everything I had in my drawer. I had decided, due to a variety of factors including pregnancy induced vericose veins, that I would no longer wear shorts. It's not that I hate my legs, just that I don't think they're my best asset and so I would rather cover them a bit more. I am no longer 18 after all. But I am not OLD so I bought a number of different, cool capri pants and some classic but sometimes funky t-shirts and wore them all summer. I threw out all but 3 pairs of shorts and I think I actually only wore shorts once this summer. I live in the mid-atlantic area and wondered whether I would regret not having shorts but I didn't at all. I felt very me all summer. I felt hip and cool, not old, but not trying to be something I no longer was.

So when the weather here started getting cooler (shouldn't really say that since today it's like 87 on the first day of fall, but it was cool earlier this week), I started to look through my closet again and got very depressed. All of my cooler weather clothes were kind of frumpy, didn't really flatter me, and didn't make me feel good about myself at all. So I informed my husband that I needed to go shopping. Thankfully he was okay with that. He understands that I am trying to become more ME and less what everyone else expects or wants me to be. In fact we've gone through some rough patches lately that in part came about because I had kind of lost who I was. I wasn't the woman he married, and to be honest he wasn't the man I married, and somehow we forgot that we needed to figure out the new people we were becoming and love those people too. But more on marriage and its potholes in another post.

So I went shopping this morning on a limited budget and with a baby in tow, but I was out there making decisions about the person I wanted to project to the world and it felt damn good. And although I have some leftover baby flab I need to get rid of, I was pretty happy with how I looked. I looked like ME. I found fewer clothes that I wanted to find and I think I will have to still wear a number of things from my old wardrobe but maybe I can dress it up somehow. It's hard to find these clothes since clothes seem to fit into the following catgories: Juniors (way too young. If I'm not 18 why try to look as though I am. No one wins this way.), Career clothes (way too dressy for staying at home and dealing with the reality of a toddler or two), Casual clothes (read frumpy or sweats or I don't really care about how I look clothes), and some other really scary stuff that is hard to define but basically that I would never be caught dead in (I have worn these before but always HATED it). Someone needs to put out a hip line of clothes for younger moms who stay at home but don't want to wear sweats all day.

But some would argue that why do stay at home moms need good looking clothes. After all, here I stand at 5pm with grass stains on my knees, juice on my thigh, and I'm not even sure what that crusty white stuff on my shoulder is. Why dress nice if that's what happens to my clothes? And another arguement I have heard is why dress nice when your kids are the only ones who see all day. To rebutt, first your kids are not the only ones who see you. You probably have a husband or partner and they see you and I doubt they like to see you look like a slob. And before you all skewer me for being so 1950 let me just say marriage is WORK and wouldn't YOU rather see your partner looking good and sexy rather than looking like a slob. It's easier to do the work when you like what you're staring at. And then you probably go out into the world at times, or at least you should, so people there see you. And even if you don't, your kids see you and what do they learn from your appearance? Above all, YOU see you. Look in the mirror. Shouldn't you like what you see?

What you wear affects you most of all. Last year my husband started to wear suits when he taught a class. It make a huge difference for him. Since he is a young professor, there tends to be a blurring of the lines sometimes with his students. But when he was in a suit he felt more authority in the classroom and I imagine the kids looked at him as more of a professor and as less of a peer. He started taking more pride in his appearance and started doing various things with his hair and other grooming. He started to live into his body. And he looks damn good because of it. I used to live into my body much more but then I had two other occupants who rented out the space and I started to lose who I was. I moved out of my body in a way. I am determined to stop that cold. My body and the clothes I wear reflect me to my husband, my kids, the world, and me. I refuse to give that way any more so I went shopping. My grandfather always said when you feel bad, go shopping and spend money and you'll feel better. You are so right Poppa.