Wear What You Want

Killing the good girl myth

I stand in front of the mirror and stand looking at my reflection sideways. Smooth my hand over my stomach and watch the soft curve at the small of my back. Behind me the slatted blinds cast light onto the pink blanket stretched across my bed and my hair is smudged like a halo. Beneath my hand, my stomach is soft and lined, its skin stretched by the four babies that grew inside my womb. I wonder often if I could make it taut again if I did planks or sit-ups for fifteen minutes every day, but I always find something more important to do with those precious minutes, and anyway the silvery stretch marks are a reminder of who I was and where I have been.

I have a pretty good relationship with my body, maybe even an improving one, but I’m depressed by the narrative surrounding the ageing body, and confused by the way I’m currently embracing my own. Living in a house with four daughters has made me hyper aware of the language I use around body image and forced me to accept that I’ve internalised some uncomfortable ideas. I blame growing up in the 90s - the muscle memory of objectification is a hard one to forget. There’s some shame there too, but I’m trying to be kind to the younger me who thought that being desired by men was the same as being powerful.

Desire is a funny thing too. I’ve written about it here (Desire: On how to lean into the longing) and here (Desire Part II: On why it matters where you sleep). The desire that I confused as an indication of my power when I was a younger woman was unhelpful because it reinforced the idea that my value lay only in my long legs and wide eyes. Living under the male gaze means that it’s taken longer than is ideal for me to understand my own worth. My body has been a vessel for too long and I am enjoying this current act of reclamation.

This week a couple of things happened that made me think more than usual about my body. Firstly, I ordered a new dress. It has pads sewn into the shoulders and a high neckline that is quite loose. The fabric clings to me and ends only a few centimetres below my bum - it is extremely short. Oh, and this dress is animal print, because at the moment I feel fierce and untameable and that seems to be translating into the clothes I wear. So you get the picture, this is a bit of a statement dress, though I’m still not sure exactly what the statement is.

As I was trying the dress on, I called my oldest daughter in to ask her opinion. Is it too short? I asked her. Do I look like mutton dressed as lamb? and my 17yo looked at me with sad eyes. You can’t say that anymore Mummy, you can wear what you like. I persisted - but does it look a bit slutty? - digging myself further and further into the bad parenting hole, as the thoughts I usually internalise spilled into the room. My daughter reminded me that only last week she had embroidered the word ‘s l u t’ onto the back of a denim jacket in an act of expression and pride. But slut to me meant being told I was exposing too much flesh, inviting sexual attention and, crucially, not being a good girl.

I am tired now of being the good girl, but old habits die hard. I’m the oldest child, I grew up with a sense that I was responsible for laying out the path to a decent, hardworking and good existence. I realise now that this is bullshit - I was responsible only for myself - but I have to work hard to shake the fear that I’m too much, when of course I’m just enough. I glanced back at myself in the mirror as my daughter looked on, tried to love the naked flesh and see it as my own and not the property of men. Tried to imagine that slut is no bad thing.

The second thing that made me think about the way I view my body was a conversation I listened to yesterday between

sam baker

and

Anna Cascarina

on The Shift about body image in middle age. My body shape has changed since I had children - I’m thinner and everything is a bit softer. When I am anxious I become hollow and feel bad that I enjoy the physical act of disappearing. When my body is too skinny, my mind is often rattling and mad.

Mainly I want to have a strong body, and I know that’s not a given as I get older. I want my daughters to know that they can be fierce and energetic, so I run hard and return home dripping in sweat. I swim naked in the sea with my friend and laugh hysterically as we drape seaweed around our bodies. Flinging my body around in the surf makes me feel invincible. I am shedding the good girl and inhabiting my wildness.

Already my body lets me down though, and I am accumulating scars with every year that passes. I’m very self-conscious about a lipoma at the top of my left arm. I like wearing tops with tiny straps, especially at the moment when Northumberland is boiling, but I don’t enjoy the glances towards the lump when I’m talking to people on a sunny day. I have a relatively new scar on my right cheek from a recent biopsy on a mark on my face. It has faded to white now, and it’s harder to see, but I need to have another operation to remove more cells in my face and that makes me feel exposed and worried about how I will look. I am a work in progress - I still feel defined by my appearance even though I tell my kids that it’s what’s on the inside that counts. And there is always my stomach - I bare it and try to love it, but however hard I breathe in, however thin I am, it still sags a little. I have never loved my stomach, even before I had children. In my 20s it was never flat, like we were told it should be, so I spent hours holding it in or wearing dresses that disguised my curves. That makes me sad, so now I stroke it and try to be a little kinder.

As I preened in front of the mirror in my new animal print mini dress, my daughter asked me slightly scathingly who I was wearing it for. Is it for a man? The truth is that I do plan to wear it when I’m with a man, but when I think about it honestly, the dress isn’t for him. The dress is for me because it makes me feel vibrant and cheeky, and I have spent too many years hidden away. But I still find it hard to own my body, and I worry about the messages I might inadvertently be sending out.

I’m trying to be more like my daughter, who wears whatever she likes and uses fashion as a form of self-expression. Part of the problem is that it is only now I’m in my 40s that I’m getting to know who I really am, so clothes are a bit of an experiment in identity. There have been years of pregnancy and breastfeeding, and years of being alone and feeling small. It’s only in the last few months that I have started to climb out towards the sunshine once more and feel able to bask in the light.