There comes a day in every new job when you let out a quiet sigh of relief because you finally feel at least a little bit competent. You figured out the spread sheet; you remembered the UPS guy’s name; you made a good decision on your own; you sounded smart in a staff meeting. I’m gonna go ahead and say that being a mom is the hardest new job I’ve ever started, and those moments of competence are few and far between. But here’s a recent one that felt pretty good.

Yep. I’m wearing jeans.

I got a lot of compliments when I resurfaced into the public eye after giving birth. My stomach went back to normal relatively quickly, and people were kind to point out that they thought I looked good. It was nice. People are nice. But I could see the whole picture. The just out of the shower picture. The still wearing 2 sizes bigger than usual underwear picture.
See, here’s the thing: My baby never got very big, and neither did my stomach. I didn’t ‘show’ until I was around 24 weeks, and no one EVER believed me about my due date. Clara’s size and birth story are a whole other topic for a whole other blog post, but I definitely stayed relatively (and sort of accidentally) small. So after I had her, it wasn’t difficult for my stomach to go back down.
As for the rest of me?
Well.
Let’s just say I had to wash my black leggings every other day…because I was wearing them every single day. None of my pants fit. Not one pair. And I knew I was supposed to give it time, and that my body had just done something absolutely miraculous, but I was still sort of confused about my new shape.
Wait, was confused? No, pardon my verb tense: am confused.

There are a lot of things about my life that changed dramatically with parenthood, not just my underwear size. My always clean house is now always messy. I have to plan days ahead of time instead moment to moment (perhaps something easy for the rest of you responsible adults, but I only started wearing a watch like 2 years ago, so…). I live in a time warp of 2 hour increments, from feeding to feeding and nap to nap, and there are some days when I just can’t do one damn thing right.

So when I finally got up the courage to shimmy my way into the soft denim and hard rivets of those unforgiving pants, I took a second to breathe that elusive sigh of competent relief. It’s one small victory at a new, terrifying and breathtaking and lovely job. They don’t look like they used to, and there’s only one pair that fits so far, but hey-

I’m a mama. Wearing jeans.  So cheers to that.

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