‘Dressing became a tiny act of maternal rebellion’
Mother-of-five Clover Stroud reveals how, eventually, clothes helped her feel like herself again…
until i had children, I never imagined that a pair of jeans could stand between me and my sanity. I was 24 when I had my first child and, until then, jeans were just an item of clothing. Of course, there were good jeans and bad jeans, those that had the magical ability to make my legs appear a little longer or thinner than they really were, or jeans that made my bum sit a bit higher, rather than flattened it. But the feelings these jeans gave me were not profound. They were not, as they were after having children, the sort of feelings that could help me maintain a sense of who I am.
People talk about how children change our identity. They bring with them love and deep joy, but also huge responsibility which, when mixed up with the exhaustion of broken nights, can quickly translate into worry, guilt, anxiety. It was only after I’d had my first child that I really understood the grave responsibility I now had not just to feed him, care for him and keep him alive, but also to be responsible for his emotional life. Creating a childhood that’s full of sunshine and delight, but also stable, meaningful and secure, is no small task.
No wonder, then, that motherhood is a place where parents lose themselves. And when I say parents, I mean women, really, because although I know there are men who put in the hours at the school gate, all the statistical evidence – and anecdotal, in the form of every single conversation I’ve ever had with other parents since I first became a mum 19 years ago – points to the fact that in most homes, women still do the lion’s share of the domestic work. Our own needs, our own desires, usually fall to the bottom of the list, somewhere beneath making time for parents evening and creating a costume for World Book Day.
Therefore, in a small, quietly powerful way, the clothes we dress ourselves in every morning can become a tiny act of rebellion against the tide of maternity which, unchecked, can drown us.
Since I first had that first baby, at 24, I’ve had another four children, who are now 16, seven, five and three, the youngest born when I was 41. My experience of being a mother has tipped into three decades – my twenties, thirties and forties – and, when I look back at photographs of myself at this time, I can identify immediately what my emotional state was like back then, not by looking at the expression on my face – how fraught or happy or exhausted I look – but by what I’m wearing.
I know, for example, that the tight, clingy dresses I usually wore during my second trimester in each pregnancy were a sign that I was feeling good. Sexy, even. Fast-forward three months to that uncomfortable point at nine months, when pregnant was the last thing I wanted to be, and the voluminous dresses or shapeless, oversized shirts I wore were a clear signal I was ready for the alien to leave my body. I never wear voluminous dresses in my non-pregnant life, and so they remind me how unlike myself I often felt in late pregnancy, strangled by that sense of exhausted, relentless discomfort that comes from having a full-term baby curled up inside your stomach.
It’s perhaps little wonder that motherhood can mess so absolutely with your psyche. Looking at images taken a few months later, cradling a five-month-old who has barely slept during much of that time, I often look absent and stunned, my clothes – an old tank top, ill-fitting khaki shorts, a frayed jersey – merely an afterthought to the endlessly pressing business of caring for that infant in my arms.
As my babies moved into toddlerhood, wearing anything white became impossible. I wore anything I could grab, close to hand, before a kid escaped out of the door to tip himself down the stairs or insert a finger into a light socket. It was the age when I was most confused about my identity as a mother, the time when I was probably most likely to experiment with ill-chosen bobble hats, the wrong size duffel coat, or logo sweaters that shrunk as soon as they got anywhere near the washing machine. A year’s worth of broken nights had also led to a sense of bone-crunching exhaustion. Honestly, I didn’t really care what I looked like.
Slowly, however, as my children have grown, I think I have re-emerged. I would not say I have anything as well organised as a uniform, but I know what works, both to look after my children in, and to help me feel like me. As a writer, I work from home, which is where the jeans come in. Because my children still wipe their hands on my legs when they’re eating Nutella at breakfast, I favour something cheap (I swear by New Look black super-skinnies; I have about 15 pairs). Wear them with Nike Air Max and maybe a tiny hint of something leopard print or fluorescent, even in the flash of the inside of a jacket, or a cuff peeping out beneath an innocuous black bomber, and I feel confident, capable, as if I can swoop from overseeing a Lego model to pitching a work project, without dropping a single plate.
Most importantly, after years of feeling like someone’s mum, now I feel like myself again. ‘My Wild And Sleepless Nights’ by Clover Stroud (£16.99, Doubleday) is out now