At times I think about my daughter borrowing my clothes one day. She’s only two so right now her interests are really just Jelly Cats and sticker books, but I like to imagine her as a teenager going through my closet, taking something without asking and wearing it in a way that I would have never thought of.
I want her to think I have great clothes and I want her to think her mom is cool.
I of course realize that there are more important things I should want my daughter to think, like the fact that her mere existence makes every cell in my body tingle and that she never has to edit or changing anything about herself before bringing something to me.
But I also want her to look at me and see a woman who didn’t disappear when she became her mother. I want her to look at me and my life and see how much fuller she made it simply by being my daughter and know full stop that I didn’t have to subtract anything from myself to make room for her.
I admit this is a lot of pressure to put on a shared wardrobe, but hear me out.
My daughter is two. She doesn’t care if my ass looks good in my barrel jeans or whether my jelly flip-flops confirm I have a pulse in 2026. As long as I can meet her where she is, she’s good. And I obviously don’t need her to think I’m hot or cool. In fact she most certainly will think I’m the opposite of that when I tell her she has to clean her room or that she can’t hologram her friends after 10pm (or however kids will communicate in 2036).
What I want is for her to see that I still care about myself. I want her to see me take time to get ready, take care of my skin, play tennis, buy things for myself and wear clothes that make me feel good. I want her to grow up understanding that caring for yourself and caring for your family are not competing interests.
I’m not sure this is something I personally understood growing up. There was always an underlying feeling of not having enough in my house. We weren’t exactly financially insecure, but we weren’t as financially stable as I would have hoped to be. My parents’ anxiety around money was palpable and it was the undertone of so many decisions, even when no one explicitly said it out loud.
My mom always loved fashion, but I never really saw her participate in it. She worked incredibly hard, but I don’t remember her ever buying something just because she liked or wanted it. If spending money on herself meant my brother or me would have to go without something, she always chose us.
In sixth grade, I wanted an $80 Kipling backpack because all my friends had one. To my parents, spending that much on a backpack (especially in 1998) was insane, but my mom bought one for me anyway.
I have zero idea what she didn’t get for herself so that I could have it. At the time I only knew that I got the backpack I wanted. I most definitely did not understand the invisible subtraction behind it.
I understand it now because I do the math every time I want something for myself. I can look at an outfit and immediately convert its price into a contribution towards my daughter’s 529 or a month’s worth of activities for her. My brain will not let me proceed without accounting for what else the money could become.
And when I do buy something for myself, I feel both things. I feel immense gratitude and pride that I can have the outfit or the bag or the shoes and still give my daughter what she needs and then some. At the same time, I still wonder if the money should have gone towards something else for her instead.
I am incredibly grateful that my mom gave us everything she could. I just don’t want to repeat the part where giving your children more always means keeping less for yourself.
A few mornings ago my daughter woke up in the middle of the night. My husband took the 1am shift and I relieved him at 4 until she finally went back to sleep at 5:30. Later, we got up, had breakfast and went through our normal morning routine. I went to get ready and consciously put on a knit tank and white jeans.
Nothing mind blowing, but we’re in the middle of potty training so between that, fractured sleep and toddler dinners, white jeans could understandably be described as the deranged choice. But ya know what, the jeans looked good, I was having a good hair day and my Saltyface tanning water was doing the Lord’s work.
Maybe I’m gas lighting myself, but I felt less tired. The outfit didn’t undo the fact that I had been awake at four in the morning and it certainly did not make potty training any easier. Even by 8pm, though, I didn’t feel as exhausted as I think I would have if I had spent the day in sweat shorts and a t-shirt. Getting dressed didn’t solve anything, but it did stop a difficult part of my morning from defining the outcome of the entire day.
This is also why I no longer save my clothes for “special occasions.” Most of my life does not contain a special occasion by standard definition. I work from home and spend a lot of time on the floor. A normal day for me might include 100 hours of Google Meet, the park, making dinner and having my daughter wipe an unidentifiable substance on my shirt. If I wait to have plans to wear the clothes that make me feel good, I will spend most of my actual life waiting to feel good.
I would rather just wear the white jeans. If they get dirty, I’ll wash them. If they get ruined, they get ruined. I absolutely hate the idea of spending my life protecting my clothes from the life I bought them to wear.
Recently, I wore one of my go-to Buck Mason t-shirts with a pair of baggy, brown Deiji Studios pants and the jelly flip-flops I bought instead of the Manolos I already wrote about here. I wore this outfit while I worked, to bring in the recycling bin, to sit on the bathroom floor while trying to convince my daughter to pee, and to a baseball game where I contentedly drank a beer. I didn’t look incredibly polished, but I was certainly polished enough.
At one point in my life, I may have heard “polished enough” and thought of it as a concession. Like I was giving up. Now I think it might be just the right theme for this season of life. I need clothes that can move through all parts of my day without requiring me to become a different person for each one. I want to look good on a work call and still be able to get on the floor when my girl decides we are Mommy Princess and Baby Princess mermaids. I feel like the styling brief is met if another mom sees me and thinks, “that woman has never crossed paths with a Tractor Wheel or encountered a Go Go SqueeZ purse explosion in her life.”
To be clear it’s not that I want a life without those things. I am beyond thankful for what these previously unfamiliar food groups represent in my life and am beyond obsessed with the tiny, perfect human that brought them into it. I just don’t want the mess to represent how I see myself or look like my life has completely run me over.
This is where the entire effortless, hot-mom thing becomes a double-edged sword though. Taking care of myself gives me confidence. It also lets me control what other people see. If I look put together, perhaps no one will look at me and think, “woah, she’s going through it,” even though sometimes I am very much going through it.
I don’t want to lie to my daughter or make her think that having feelings is some kind of personal failure, but I also don’t want a sleepless night or a hard moment to become the status of my life. I don’t want the evidence that motherhood is difficult to somehow become interpreted as evidence that my daughter made my life worse. Am I projecting? Maybe and probably. But just in case, let the record show she made my life infinitely better.
I also want to be clear that this isn’t about status. I’m not interested in having the latest it-bag so that everyone knows what it costs or being the most fashion-forward woman in the room. What I want is to look like no one in my house was denied of anything, including me.
Which is not the same as saying I’ve figured it out. I still want more clothes. I still want more money to buy them. I want to be able to see something beautiful that I don’t need and just purchase it without presenting myself with a detailed report on all the more responsible things I should/would/could do instead. I’m still doing the math. For now I’ll buy the thing anyway and let the calculations run in the background like they always do. I was in remedial math my entire high school career so how accurate could the numbers be anyway?
One last thing: Some links above are affiliate links; I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I link to things I’ve bought, things I’ve rejected, and things I’m still deciding on. I’ll always say which.