The Clothes Make the Girl

by Brittany Gibbons

  I was never a morning birther; all of my kids came conveniently after the hospital cafeteria and kitchen were closed. So after working a whole person down my birth canal for twenty hours on nothing but a diet of water and ice chips, I was given two prepackaged deli sandwiches from the overnight fridge, wheeled to my room, and left alone with my food and baby for the very first time.

  It was only then, after I settled into the soft bed, that I peered over the head of my nursing infant to check the damage. My stomach looked much the same as it had the day before, but was now soft and still. That is actually one of the more trippy aspects of childbirth: once you have the baby, you begin to recognize their movements, and remember what they felt like from the inside.

  The swelling in my ankles and feet was starting to subside, and feeling was returning to my calves and toes.

  But my pubic area was just a mess of padding and ice packs and tape all stuffed into an adult diaper made from the mesh of an eighties tank top. At first glance, it was a car crash. But once I stood up, and waddled around the room a bit, I quickly realized I was wearing the most comfortable underwear on the planet. This one-size-fits-all garment is flattering, perfectly soothing against your still-inflated stomach, and feels like you are wearing everything and yet nothing, all at the same time. And if that’s not enough, it also holds all the gear you need to address the pain shooting out from your vagina.

  How are these not sold in mainstream markets? Why are we not seeing these on the Angels clomping down a Victoria’s Secret runway? Is it because we can only trick women into buying sexy underwear if it also feels like the crotch is made of a hairbrush? The market would be huge. We’re talking actual see-through underwear made sexier by the fact that you can store stuff in them. Like hamster cheeks. Mesh-hamster-cheek underwear.

  Shortly after the birth of my third child, our daughter, Gigi, Andy and I agreed it was time for a vasectomy. Something he will be quick to tell you was “really painful, and really hard to describe it to someone who hasn’t experienced it firsthand.”

  It became pretty obvious postclipping that his boxers were ill equipped to support the bags of frozen vegetables he strategically layered around his scrotum, so I selflessly dug into my hidden mesh-panty inventory and fixed him up with a bag of frozen pearl onions.

  My youngest daughter is eight, and I still have eleven pairs of mesh underwear from her birth. I keep them on hand, not only for myself, but because I like to slip a pair into baby-shower gift baskets. The recipient always looks slightly confused until the moms around her realize what is in her hands and circle her, cooing and nodding their heads.

  “Let us sing you the song of our people!”

  Everyone tells you to grab as many free diapers, swaddling blankets, and pacifiers as you can from the baby cart they wheel into your room each day, and you should: that stuff is amazing. But as all the mothers on baby and birth forums preach, it’s the panties that are the true treasure. I’ve even tried to find them online, but it is just one of those things that are really hard to replicate, so you have to take really good care of them.

  My whole life, I’ve never adhered to a hand-wash- or dry-clean-only tag, in fact I’ve never even been inside a dry cleaner. However, despite my past neglect for general fabric-care instruction, there I was delicately hand-washing the blood out of my onetime-use, completely disposable, beloved mesh underwear, and then lining them up to dry over the shower curtain bar.

  In a way, I think the mesh underwear is used to prepare you for motherhood, at least the early stages when nothing is conventionally attractive and everything is stretchy and important.

  I want to cut in really quick here because while pregnancy is a really amazing experience, and we’re totally going to talk more about navigating it, I want to touch on the fact that it is also an experience that is routinely ruined by gobs and gobs of assholes.

  Some of them are people you know, some of them are strangers who come up to you in stores, some of them write columns in glossy magazines or on the Internet, and some of them are, gasp, doctors.

  Obviously, I am not a doctor, and you should seek medical advice from me never, but I have to ask, at what point did we declare open season on women’s pregnant bodies? I gained sixty pounds during my first pregnancy, turned around, got pregnant again right away, and gained twenty more pounds. That is an eighty-pound weight gain in less than a year. And let me tell you something: pregnancy is the kindest I have ever been to my body.

  I had spent twelve of the twenty-four years prior to my first pregnancy taking diet pills that would land me in the hospital with tachycardia, spitefully starving myself, taking laxatives, wearing down the enamel of my teeth throwing up just so I could maintain and not gain any more weight, and mentally punishing myself after every uncontrollable binge. I’ve googled how to purchase a tapeworm with a level of seriousness that was both undeterred and grotesque.

  But most people don’t notice any of that when they see me sitting in a restaurant pregnant and eating off the same menu they ordered from. They see me as someone being gluttonous, careless, indulgent, and using pregnancy as an excuse to “eat for two,” when the honest-to-God truth is that I was sufficiently eating for one for the very first time in a very long time.

  Gaining eighty pounds in order to bring two perfect little boys into this world was one of the most selfless things I’ve ever done, because I finally valued something more than I wanted to be skinny. And I did it all under the care of a medical professional whom I saw in a real doctor’s office, because that is where sane people go to get their medical advice. They don’t get it from nasty women in the yogurt aisle of the grocery store or from doctors on the Internet who pile on pregnant celebrities, or from anyone in a YouTube comment section.

  I’ve had skinny friends who have gained weight, I’ve had fat friends who’ve lost weight, and the only “right” way to do pregnancy weight is with your doctor. Everyone else can suck it.

  I know it’s not for everyone, but I actually enjoyed the physical aspects of being pregnant. The mental aspect was terrifying. Nine whole months of trying to keep the baby alive, scrutinizing everything I ate (see above), mentally counting kicks, and then freaking out about the kicks. It was exhausting, and I thought it would all just be okay once the baby was finally born, so then that happened and I immediately realized babies were way easier to care for while they were still inside me. But my obstetrician only took them out, he didn’t put them back in, so I was stuck with them out here.

  So yeah, aside from that, I loved pregnancy.

  Pregnancy addressed all the ways I’d previously been unenthused about my body. First, my stomach, which had been soft and doughy, and without definition, was suddenly rock-hard. It took putting a whole person inside me to give me abs, and I was totally okay with that.

  As previously discussed, my prepregnancy boobs were long and uneventful. It’s like all the fat just sat in my nipples and pulled them down like socks full of pennies; bad for foreplay, awesome for Mafia hits. Pregnancy inflated them, making them swollen and veiny, and my nipples grew darker and more sensitive. Couple this with the fact that I was always panting and out of breath, it was like I was a living sex doll.

  Lastly, there was the hair. Ladies, pregnancy is a nine-month span where scales could cover your entire body, but add a head of pregnancy hair, and they’d legitimately choose you as the next Bachelorette. Men and women would fight over you. That is how amazingly full and glossy pregnancy hair is. It’s like fetuses are full of biotin and Pantene.

  Biologically speaking, pregnancy was really going well for me, but that is where the honeymoon ended. Pregnancy fashion was rough, but plus-size pregnancy fashion in 2006, 2007, and 2009 had just barely evolved past the giant tarp they threw over the dead bodies on Law & Order.

  Best-case scenario, get pregnant during the cold months so you swell and sweat less. Then again, being pregnant in the summer means you get to wear less clothes and float around a pool like a ma
rtini olive.

  So yeah, kinda sucks either way.

  Congratulations, you’re pregnant! Now get ready for exactly no one to notice, because chances are you don’t look pregnant at all.

  Assuming this is your first pregnancy . . . My second and third pregnancies had me looking six months pregnant by the time Andy pulled out. But for the first one, that just didn’t happen, and it was really upsetting. When you find out you are pregnant—on purpose at least—looking pregnant is something you are really excited about. And as an overweight woman, I was especially excited to finally feel justified in the way my body looked.

  I wasn’t just fat, I was fat with a purpose!

  Unfortunately I, like many like many women both thin and fat, spent the first few months of my pregnancy looking not so much with child but, rather, bloated. The kind of bloated where you think three slices of pizza is the right amount, but you get cocky and go for four anyways, and you’re uncomfortable the rest of the night. It’s that feeling all day, and it makes it incredibly hard to dress.

  The good news is that during the first trimester, many of the clothes you are currently wearing will still work for you, especially if they are baggy and flow away from the stomach. My wardrobe just had to meet two basic criteria: Is it comfortable? And can I clean it easily if I throw up on it?

  I spent a lot of time wearing cotton sun- and maxi-dresses, but when I had to actually wear pants, I was pretty insistent on making my normal jeans work, and I did so by using what is called the rubber-band trick. Thread a rubber band through the buttonhole of your jeans, and then pull one end of it through the other, securing it to your pants. Use that rubber band as the new “buttonhole.” This trick is equally effective for both early maternity jeans and twenty-five-cent-all-you-can-eat wing night.

  Once you hit the second trimester, you begin to panic, especially if you haven’t “popped” yet. I promise, it’s completely normal. Everyone pops on their own time, and popping may not even look the same for you as it does for other women. Depending on your body type, you may carry very low, or high near your ribs. Some women get really wide, some don’t even look pregnant from the back, and some women get what is called a B-belly or double belly, which makes them look as if the pregnancy is being carried high, with the skin from a muffin top above or mother’s apron below.

  But regardless of where you are in the bloat-to-belly-pop transition, now is the time for maternity clothes. Stop dragging your feet on this and trust me. I tried to play it all cool. I mean, it is hard to embrace the idea that your life is changing completely and revamp your entire wardrobe at the same time. I stalled as long as I could. But by my second trimester there was no time to lose. I can’t remember my bozo reasoning for putting off buying maternity jeans, probably some misguided belief that elastic pants were an admission of defeat, but I was an idiot. Trying on my first pair of maternity jeans was like taking off a pair of stilettos after a night of dancing: pure orgasmic relief.

  There are quite a few options when it comes to maternity jeans, but the two most popular styles remain demi-panel and full panel. A demi-panel is a stretchy panel that runs around the top of a jean or pant, in place of working buttons and zippers, and sits below your tummy. Full-panel pants are based on the same concept, except that the panel covers the entire stomach and sits under your bra. Both of these can be a win for a girl who likes pull-on pants, but as a plus-size woman, I fell in love with the full panel.

  Not only was having the panel covering my stomach and holding me in more comfortable, it also helped to create the look of a pregnant tummy by corralling all of my chubby, bloated flesh into a pretty little bump.

  But, just like a lot of normal plus-size fashion, plus-size maternity fashion does this really weird thing where it skews old, basic, or gaudy. Like, bejeweled jeans, flutter-sleeve tees, and classic-cut stretchy pants. Nothing screams vibrant fertility like a good ponte slack! Just because I was knocked up didn’t mean I wanted to look like a granny, especially during the second trimester when I was basically a nymphomaniac, which is actually another great argument for maternity jeans. Nothing comes off faster than elastic pants.

  Finally I hit the third trimester—a trimester so uncomfortable, I put my old maternity jeans on in order to write this section. That is how uncomfortable I get just thinking about my third trimester.

  I have a friend who found it infinitely helpful to remind me that during the later stages of her pregnancy, she couldn’t fit into anything, so she just wore all her husband’s sweatshirts over leggings, and looked adorable. Wearing Andy’s sweatshirts over leggings isn’t an option for nonpregnant Brittany, and it became far less of one with a baby belly.

  While putting away laundry last week, I accidentally placed a pair of my jeans in Andy’s closet. One morning, he put them on.

  “Yikes, these aren’t mine.” He was standing behind me in the bathroom mirror, the jeans buttoned, and they were falling off his body the way Tom Hanks’s adult clothes did when he turned back into a kid in the movie Big.

  “Yeah, they’re mine.” I glared at his reflection in the mirror. “Because I’m fatter than you.”

  Not all women are dainty moms-to-be with bellies, and tossing on our partner’s clothes isn’t a privilege many of us have.

  By the third trimester, everything I wore was stretchy, cool, and easy to pull down to pee every hour. Fitted tank tops (remember, rock-hard abs), maxi-dresses, and leggings were my life.

  I also had several pairs of gaucho pants, but it was a different time back then, and we’re not going to talk about those anymore.

  There is no greater competition than the one that exists between moms and their prepregnancy jeans. For some reason, fitting into our prepregnancy jeans as soon as humanly possible wins you some sort of mom award.

  “Oh my gosh, your baby is so beautiful,” I gushed to the woman next to me in the waiting area of our ob-gyn.

  “Thank you, I’m actually already back into my prepregnancy jeans.” She smiled.

  “Oh wow. That’s impressive.”

  “Yeah, I even weigh less than I did before I got pregnant, so . . .”

  And then I stabbed her. I’m kidding. It’s just that we have really terrible messaging in regard to postbaby mom bodies. We watch celebrities have babies and then reemerge from their secret off-the-grid Illuminati tents slimmer than they’d been before. They sit for interviews where they’re asked what they did to drop the weight, and they just smile and say breastfeeding and that they’re soooooo busy with the baby they barely remember to eat.

  Can I just say, I have never in my life been in a situation where I’ve forgotten to eat? In fact, by the time I put my contacts in every morning, I’ve already mapped out what my next two meals will be.

  Then we have magazine covers and morning shows blasting story after story about getting back to that prebaby body, and all the latest diets and trends to aid along the way. Corsets, low-carb meal planning, cardio workouts. I’m sorry, how is any of this happening when I couldn’t even manage to shower myself or poop without biting down on a leather strap for the first few weeks after childbirth? Who was going to hold my baby for the three hours it was going to take to put that corset on?

  Every high five we’d given ourselves as we met every milestone over the course of the last nine months goes out the window during this time. Our bodies go from actual miraculous vessels to big giant failures.

  It takes nine whole months to make a baby. I don’t know specifically how long eyeballs or feet take, but I know that it’s a really long time of your body doing really cool stuff. Why do we expect everything to go back to normal immediately after spending months and months building an actual human? I’ve had a LEGO version of the Hogwarts castle partially built in the middle of my office for two years, and I gave myself less grief about that than I did about losing my pregnancy weight.

  And even if you do get back to that prebaby place, it’s going to take a minute, okay? It’s going to take a min
ute for your body to revert to a place where it’s not actively making fingers. Systems need to cool down. Everyone and everything just needs to relax.

  As a new mom, I had no chill. Not only did I not get back into my prepregnancy jeans, but breastfeeding made me ravenously hungry, so much so that I gained more weight. So not only did none of my prepregnancy clothes fit me, but even my pregnancy clothes got tight. It was all going very badly.

  Even if I had managed to drop weight, my body had changed. My stomach was deflated, but my boobs were heavy with milk, and my hips and butt had doubled in size. I blame this on the fact that I barely stood upright the first two months after giving birth. All I did was sit and nurse. And guys, my vagina got fat. I don’t even know how that became a target area for weight gain, but I swear I carried all my third-pregnancy baby weight in my mons pubis. To this day I look like Hulk Hogan when I’m wearing bikini bottoms.

  So, if you’ve had a baby or three, you are likely nodding along in agreement just about now as you relive that glory. If you haven’t had any . . . well, you are welcome. Take my advice and know that you need to take a deep breath and accept the fact that going forward, some things will just be different.

  You’re definitely going to pee more, that’s a given. And due to nursing, your nipples may morph from something fun into two numb chew toys at the ends of your boobs. My nipples are purely decorative at this point. And finally, the general shape of your body and how clothes fit will change, and that’s not a bad thing, it’s just new.