• Cropped Tweed Blazer: Tracy Reese via Nordstrom’s (2004?)
• Navy Tee: Gap Maternity
• Black Trousers: Gap Maternity
• Black Flats: Bandolino via ShoeWoo
• Necklace: David Yurman, gifted

I’m so happy to be participating in Academichic’s Dress Your Best weeks this year! For the next two weeks, I’ll be featuring outfits that feature my best, well, features, as well as some that reframe those I’m less sure about in morebody-positive ways. In a time of personal, professional and physical flux, I’m looking forward to this opportunity to celebrate the state I’m in—where I am in my body-image journey, and the ways that clothes (and blogging!) both mediate and perform aspects of my relationship to my body.

To start out this process, I’m,well…cheating, and starting with some low-hanging fruit: my baby bump. I’m thrilled to be pregnant, and D. and I can’t wait to meet our daughter in September. It’s fascinating to watch my body change (often seemingly by the hour) to nurture this new life, which seems to announce itself with increasing volume on a minute-by-minute basis (why yes, little bean, I suppose that is your…foot?…i can see kicking through tight tee-shirts?).

But loving the state of affairs and springing into being with an innate understanding of how to dress a body that seems to change almost too rapidly aren’t the same thing, and I haven’t necessarily been a model of how to integrate my changing form into my self-concept smoothly. Initially, I struggled to navigate dressing a bump that was big enough to seem to make all my clothes refuse to fit, but that didn’t “read” as obviously pregnant. As time went on and my pregnancy became more obvious, I became more aware of the assessments some people made as they read the shape of my body against their own expectations of what a woman at stage X of pregnancy “should” look like. When I started a new (summer) job more than five months into my pregnancy, I grappled with the appropriate way to dress the pregnant body in a professional environment surrounded by people I’ve never met. I’ve tried (not always successfully) to balance “cuteness” and professionalism, between “coming out” and passing. Like so many things about my life right now, this is all still a work in progress.

But today, I’m not passing or even balancing, I’m announcing. I’m speaking and removing all doubt, rather than remaining silent and being thought a fool, so to speak. Does it affect people’s perceptions of me? In some way (for better or for worse), of course it does. But bodies are never neutral, and this body—with everything it “says” or appears to say about my private life, my goals, my personality or what have you—is the one I have right now, and the things it says—to me, anyway—are pretty darn worth celebrating. So good for you, bump. You’ve got kind of a lot going on—and it’s all stuff I’m pretty proud of.

Just for the sake of amusing comparisons, here’s nearly the same outfit at the beginning and end of my second trimester:

Time flies, doesn’t it?