Before her birth, I spent many a lockdown-and-pregnant evening naively reading feminist literature around juggling careers and babies, but once my daughter was born I realised the rhethoric can be a bit dangerous, as it glosses over a balancing act that is fraught with sacrifice and do-it-all pressure.
Of course I tried to cling on, I wrote a magazine piece while breastfeeding a few weeks after my daughter was born, more for its therapeutic value than anything else, all while untangling the psychological knot I’d later understand was a form of PTSD after a protracted, touch-and-go birth ending in an emergency c-section. But I began to feel detached, cast adrift into milk-pumping, nappy-changing, eye-bag land. Slumping deliriously from sofa to bed, dressed in pyjamas at best, made me feel a shadow of my former self.
It goes without saying that I adored my beautiful baby, but I also mourned the mental stimulation that comes from working in an industry you love. Travel writing and hopping on planes to faraway lands seemed preposterous when a trip to the corner shop was a struggle. What’s more, I lamented my old uniform, a decade-long curation of beautiful clothes I’d collected on my travels like precious coins, which now took too long to throw on, pull together, rubbed my c-section wound, or, crucially, didn’t unbutton for breastfeeding.
These sleep-deprived early days of Mars Bar lunches and 3am buttered-toast seemed to drag on, but a humble walk to the local park café marked a real turning point. Persuaded by my perceptive mother to pick out a comfortable but fashionable outfit, I scanned the large, breastfeeding-unfriendly tranche of my wardrobe and eventually settled on a burnt orange mohair cardigan. It was a statement jumper that lifted the grey pregnancy shirt dress I was wearing – but even more crucially, it lifted my mood. Indeed, its loud, ludicrously large buttons were easy to slide off at feeding time, while the design, which was a trippy spin on cottagecore, aligned more with my sartorial identity than anything in the limited, lacklustre world of nursing tops and dresses.
