Wardrobe

Yesterday was a big milestone for me: I wore non-maternity pants for the first time since last spring! Granted, they were my loosest-fitting pants pre-pregnancy, and getting into them was a bit of a squeeze, but still, they actually have a non-elasticized waist! A zipper fly is such a novelty to me now. It did make for some briefly disconcerting moments in the restroom though, embarrassingly enough.

This is happy news (the non-maternity pants, not the fly-related confusion), because it means a) that I am down to 9 pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight, which is to say that I’ve lost 36 pounds, and b) that I can finally unpack all my regular clothes that have been packed in boxes since our move this summer. Granted, actually accomplishing that wardrobe transition was not exactly fun (and finding time for it seemed impossibly unlikely for a long time), but now that it’s done I feel much more settled.

That said, actually packing away my maternity clothes was bittersweet. I know that I am not packing them away for my own future use, but rather so that they can be passed on to the next knocked up friend or relative who wears my approximate size, and that leaves me feeling (just a little bit, I swear) wistful. The memories of purchasing so many of those clothes back when I was 16 weeks pregnant — thinking that, no, really, I totally had a belly! — are memories of excitement and disbelief and happy anticipation. So there was some nostalgia there to say the least. A lot of the clothes have strong pregnancy-specific associations: the dresses I wore to my baby showers; the bathing suit I squeezed into at Lake Winnipesaukee so I could float in the lake and get some relief from the weight of my belly; the ridiculously overlarge maternity shirt I enthusiastically wore to work the day I finally shared the news of my pregnancy with co-workers. (That shirt, incidentally, was decidedly too small to fit over my belly by the bitter end.) When I acquired all those clothes, I knew that they would only be a temporary wardrobe for me, but like most things in life, I couldn’t really appreciate how quickly that time would actually pass.

No sense dwelling on the past, though. Time to look ahead. And by that I mean I really really hope I fit into my pre-pregnancy jeans again soon.

Filed under Pregnancy | Tags: pregnancy nostalgia clothes | Comments (3)