- Chambray Shirtdress: Target
- Burgundy Tights: HUE
- Red Scarf (worn as cowl): Malo, mommed
- Brown Riding Boots: Franco Sarto via Zappos
- Brown Woven Belt: LOFT
Last week, Lex asked me about my adventures with crocodiles that I teased a while back. The resulting tale sweeps broadly enough to link together this outfit (and yet another analogous-reds combination), forty days of wandering in the desert, new parenthood and yesterday’s misadventures. If it had a twee soundtrack, it would be the stuff that Wes Anderson films are made of…or a reason to call the Society the for Prevention of Cruelty to Metaphors. It’s also something I’ve never shared. Here we go:
* * *
It’s mid-July of 2004 and though it’s “winter” in the Northern part of Western Australia, you wouldn’t know it: here, “winter” means no flooding, soaking rain, a few extra hours in the morning before the temperature tops 100F, and an entirely different cast of hazardous characters. It is the most beautiful place I have ever been, desolate and open and undisturbed, but also terrifying, like a hot version of Antarctica, like living on the moon. We are deep in the King Leopold Ranges of the central Kimberley, where we have been for some fifteen days. Other than the morning we hiked out to the road to meet the re-ration truck, we have seen no other humans since we left Broome. We have seen no other humans because there aren’t any: the population density of this part of Western Australia is .247 people per square kilometer, vastly outnumbered by sheep, kangaroos, cows (feral and domestic), and snakes. We’ve been assigned random spots along the banks of a stream for twenty-four hour “solos,” so here I am, all alone with a copy of David Amsden, my journal, and a camera. Probably, there are pictures of my desperately swollen feet to mark the occasion sitting on a memory card somewhere in our house.
* * *
I am, at this precise moment, more alone than I have ever been in my life, and more than I ever will be again. Six months ago, in what I have to fairly describe as a fit of late-adolescent pique, I decided to follow through on a longstanding ambition to take a National Outdoor Leadership School course, and because I was petulant and generally pretty aggravating and sick of being in Charlottesville and nineteen, I picked the one that sounds furthest away and most dramatic in the catalog. Broome, the tiny town on the northern tip of Western Australia we left from, is nearly 14,000 miles from home: it is almost literally as far away as I could possibly go.
Of course, life has changed since then. Whatever the great crisis of the winter of my second year of college was, it has more or less subsided, I’ve wrapped up the term and come home, and I’ve met D., and with the heady self-assurance of being young and strangely more reckless than either of us usually are, we’re oddly serious and confident about each other almost immediately. When it finally comes time to get on a plane and fly half way around the world, I am excited but also almost mournful. I land in Auckland after a day and a half worth of plane flights and feel like I’ve landed in Lost in Translation without the ironic distance.
I wander around New Zealand for three weeks in a haze of late-teen angst and insecurity, staying in hostels and riding buses through a landscape that really does look exactly like the establishing shots in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Thanks to cheap international phone cards, I talk to D. most days. I climb a mountain that appears in the opening sequence to The Two Towers, and jump out of a low-flying airplane, but those are both tales for another time. I watch a lot of rugby, re-read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in anonymous restaurants, and don’t drink even though it’s legal. I write in a journal. A lot.
There are twelve of us on the course, and two instructors. Eleven women and three men in total. Mostly American college students, with two friends finishing up a year volunteering with Americorps and doing this as a stop on a world tour they’re taking together. We fall in and out of alliances, but no one can get voted off the island. We are it, we fourteen strangers, in the desert, for 35 days.
We start out with hazard training. The take us to a snake farm and try to teach us to identify poisonous and non-poisonous snakes (and because there are 10 college girls and snakes, there are embarrassing pictures). The highlight of the afternoon is the trip to the croc park, though, where captured, ancient saltwater crocodiles laze about in caged sections of a muddy stream. They look like dinosaurs. We talk about how to identify one in the water without disturbing it, about safety precautions when setting up campsites and gathering water. An attendant torments an eighty year old croc with a ball. The croc suddenly leaps from the water and runs for the large, pink ball, which deflates in his jaws. The image haunts me. A few times during our 35 days in the bush we see eyes in the water, and one night a small monitor lizard wakes me up running up the beach to the rock I’m sleeping on. I won’t forget them. Ever.
The NOLS philosophy doesn’t generally involve a lot of explaining why you’re being asked to do what you’re doing. There’s also a resistance to the use of technology that’s either quaint or incredibly aggravating, depending on your point of view, so here we are, wandering in the desert with topographical maps and compases and nary a GPS or a marked hiking trail in sight. Every day, when we divide into two groups to hike to our next campsite, each group is given a “snake beacon,” that will send off an alarm to summon a Medivac if necessary. We take on increasing leadership roles in baby steps: first rotating who leads the group with an instructor to assist with navigating, then being “leader for the day” with no instructor assistance but the instructor present, then off on our own in groups of six for the day, with instructions to meet at an X on the map by evening, then, eventually, on our own in groups of six for the last five days.
* * *
The first day that I was the “leader for the day” was oddly like my first days as a parent. I muddled through in a haze of self-doubt, worrying that I wouldn’t do “well enough,” with no idea what well-enough meant. I remember wanting nothing more than for someone to make decisions for me, to tell me I was “doing it right,” for feedback of some kind that would guide me. I wanted absolution for my unknown and assuredly myriad failings, to have someone show me what to do and how to do it. Unsurprisingly, whatever it was I was looking for—in either case—was not forthcoming.
I’m an ambitious person, but I’m also an instinctual conflict avoider. If something doesn’t work out well, it often doesn’t take me long to develop a once-burned, twice shy approach to insulate myself from the possibility of future failure. I change course, radically if necessary, to try to give myself the best shot, to evade the hot, buttered boiling sensation of having screwed up. I do my best to fight this instinct, but there’s no denying I feel it. Even yesterday: I received some mildly disappointing news and remember that feeling flooding my senses, the desire not to even try again, to close doors, to hide.
But there is no running away in the desert, and there’s no “doing it right,” either. There’s only getting from here to there, only finding the X by nightfall. You have to live with the person you are and the things you do every day, to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the face of embarrassment, failure, misstatement, sunburn, severe aggravation. There is no such thing as conflict avoidance, and there is no one to make decisions for you. It doesn’t mean you do everything perfectly—we miscalculated our remaining food supply and ended up so hungry we fought over the crumbs out of the packet of cake mix our instructors gave us to celebrate my 20th birthday—but you do it. And you discover, at the end, that you’ve been doing it all along.
* * *
I’ve never written before about this time in my life, though that in and of itself is a strange realization. Physically, those days changed me: I broke my wrist when I tripped carrying a 70-pound backpack, I may have gotten a mild case of Ross River Fever, I came home with some stress-related GI problems that have never really gone away. But more than that, it very much was the emotional turning point in my life, the moment when I began becoming the person I am today, when my life began to take the shape it now more or less holds.
I didn’t plan on it being the case. Or at least, not in the way I expected. In my teenage frustration I had planned on exhausting myself to the point of clarity, on drowning out the noise in my head with the clear air of long, difficult days. And I suppose that happened, but the real kicker was what all that noise was replaced with. At some point, maybe after that first miserable day trying to lead the group or maybe on that dark night with the monitor lizard or maybe that morning that we were out of food and the stream had run dry and we had to keep going, anyway, I stopped being the person who always ran away and started being the person who ran towards things, who trusted her ability to put one foot in front of the other and keep going.
I am not always that person, and I certainly wasn’t yesterday afternoon, but I’d do better to remind myself—as a parent, as a scholar, as a friend—that I can be, that I pride myself on being the kind of person who solves problems in life, who makes things happen. Someone who doesn’t just want, but does, who doesn’t wait for things to happen to her. Who remembers that there’s no one coming, but knows that that’s okay, anyway.
* * *
If you’ve read this far looking for the kicker of how this relates back to the outfit I’m wearing in these photos: the folks from the Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Metaphors did indeed call, and suggested that stretching it any further was just inhumane. So I’ll just say this: the aesthetic reminds me of those dusty days and the baking sun, of a climate for which there isn’t really a right thing to wear to protect you from the heat and the vegetation and the sun and the snakes all at once. Call it outback-inspired. Call it a very, very odd kind of power dressing, drawing on a very strange, and often hidden, source of power.
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to. Note: Google Friend Connect will be discontinued in early March, so please shift your subscriptions to RSS or Bloglovin’ before the end of February!
One last thought: I’d be so honored and thankful if you’d take a minute to vote for me in the Circle of Moms’ search for the Top 25 Fashion and Beauty bloggers! You can click here to vote (or the button in the sidebar), once per day until February 28, 2012. (No registration required).
Like most new parents, we had grand plans for how “normal” our post-baby life would be. Inspired by our remarkably portable niece, we imagined going places in the evenings, taking her on long excursions during the day, having spontaneous adventures…
Yeah. About that. As it happens, M. very much likes to sleep in her crib, thankyouverymuch, and not really in other places. And I can’t really say I blame her, since the world is a pretty interesting place. But between her preference for sleeping at home and my logistical and emotional need for some semblance of routine from an early date (about which more later), things have looked, well, different than we expected.
But we had one cherished dream for our post-baby life that I’d been unwilling to give up on, even though it’s been on the shelf for a while: taking M. rock climbing with us. D. and I met in a climbing gym more than seven years ago, and through injuries (some serious) and other interruptions, it’s been a major part of our lives (and indeed, has been a part of mine since I started doing it competitively in high school). With precautions and my doctor’s okay, I continued climbing some until I was about 20 weeks pregnant, and I hadn’t been back since then. (D. has been in and out with injuries since then, but has been back a few times since M. was born.)
And then finally, yesterday, it happened. We wrapped up work a little early, picked M. up and headed off to the climbing gym. We alternated playing with the baby and working on boulder problems for a few hours, introducing her to old friends and introducing our muscles to old ways of moving. And when she eventually needed to eat, I found myself leaning against a back wall of the gym, nursing a smiling baby, unable to stop smiling myself.
It wasn’t the greatest night of climbing I’ve ever had. We’re still figuring out the kinks of getting both of us enough climbing time, and my shoes are mindbogglingly tight on my relaxin-stretched feet. Lateral movement on overhangs is… slightly jarring, a searing reminder that I need to keep working on my core strength as my body continues to knit itself back together. But my arms are sore in a euphoria-inducing way, and I felt alive, and alert, and blissfully happy.
But it wasn’t just the pump in my forearms and the thrill of being off the ground that made our night, it really was the experience of being there together. Of getting to feel physically more like my prepregnancy self, sure, but also of getting to feel like the kind of family we’ve always said we wanted to be. The kind who shares the things we love with our daughter, who blends her smoothly into our adult lives (as cute as it is to watch her focus so, so hard on the toys on her exersaucer). I know this may only get harder as she continues hurtling down the path towards being a toddler, which is all the more reason to push myself out of my comfort zone of chaos-avoidance to help us live the kind of life we want to now, before things change again.
Who knows, maybe I’ll have to make an exception to my shopping ban for a new pair of climbing shoes (and to do some research on kid-sized harnesses).
Do you play sports or enjoy outdoor activities with your kids, or have memories of doing so with your own parents?
{ photographic proof of a night well spent, my #febphotoaday self-portrait }
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to. Note: Google Friend Connect will be discontinued in early March, so please shift your subscriptions to RSS or Bloglovin’ before the end of February!
One last thought: I’d be so honored and thankful if you’d take a minute to vote for me in the Circle of Moms’ search for the Top 25 Fashion and Beauty bloggers! You can click here to vote (or the button in the sidebar), once per day until February 28, 2012. (No registration required).
- Patterned Shirtdress: (Accidental!) Target
- Teal Cardigan: Caslon via Nordstrom’s, gift from Mom
- Black Tights: HUE
- Brown Riding Bots: Franco Sarto via Zappos
- Belt: Forever21
- Earrings: Old Navy
Much as being a parent in law school (or in any setting where relatively few people have kids) has its “oooh! Look at the pandas!” moments, my particular experience suggests that pandas might not be so rare. In one three-month span this summer and early fall, five children were welcomed by students from my first-year section (of 120) alone.
This is not at all representative of law students as a whole, or even students at my law school, and I don’t know what was in the water last winter that explains the great Section One Baby Boom of Fall 2011. It’s worth noting that it’s not just our child-rearing habits that seem to be ahead of the curve; a decent number of my classmates were married before beginning law school, and that number has grown over the last 2.5 years. I’d like to think we’re exercising some kind of group defiance against the (bogus but oft-repeated) idea that law school has to entirely kill your personal life and your relationships with anyone outside law school, but that rebellion is probably more in my head than anything else.
We make a strange secret society, our motley crew of zombie parents (frequently indistinguishable from zombie law students of other stripes). Some of us were good friends before we all became parents at around the same time, and some of us have little in common other than that. But amid a whole lot of trying to appear normal, we share our secret Real Lives, passing down leftover newborn diapers and advice about class schedules and back-up child care. Membership comes with its own private rituals and obligations, a strange amalgam of commiseration about sleep schedules and an iron-clad promise to cover if you have to miss class.
Although I planned (or attempted to plan) many aspects of our process-of-becoming-parents (and boy, am I eager to tell you about them!), this was not one of them. Among my friends from college, D. and I were frontier settlers in the land of marriage, and if you’d asked me who I thought would be accompanying us on this journey to the outer space of parenthood, I certainly would not guessed that it would be my law school classmates. It’s turned out to be a wonderful surprise: while there are universal things about parenting that anyone whose done it can tell you, there is a kind of magic, healing bond that comes of experiencing very similar things at very similar times. And while much of the “parent wars” (I won’t say “mommy wars”) rhetoric out there is unhelpful nonsense, it is certainly not false that the way our lives are organized (economically, structurally, logistically) influences how we experience parenting, and that it can be incredibly helpful to have people around you implementing similar models and experiencing similar challenges. I don’t know if you’ve heard this rumor, but the early days of being a new parent can be incredibly lonely, even as they are magical in ways you never could have guessed; it helps to have some hands to guide your metaphoric leap into the great unknown.
I wore this outfit to a lunch with some of our partners in crime/law school parenting; my friend S(3). and I are both home with our kids on Fridays, and often get together for lunch with the babies and sometimes a spouse or another friend from school. His son l. is only six weeks older than baby m., and they aren’t really old enough to meaningfully interact, but they smile at each other sometimes, and we trade off holding babies and burp clothes so nobody has to eat the entire meal one-handed, and we go home relieved that we’ve made it out of the house, that we have Done A Thing Today, Darn It. It has done wonders for everyone’s sanity. This dress (yet another accidental Target find), in all its milk-friendly glory, was forced into early retirement after the fourteenth spit-up incident during the two hours we were out of the house. Thankfully, it seems to have survived the wash, and I look forward to rejoicing in its dot-matrix pattern, its swishy shape, and oh, yes, those fabulous buttons, in many remixes to come (particularly if this warm weather keeps up. Insane!).
There are aspects of our experience that we don’t share, of course, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that of these five families, I am the only female parenting student. There are days when this state of being not-just-a-parent-but-a-mother matters more and less, but for these last few weeks and months before we all splinter off to the wide blue yonder, I’m trying to be a lumper rather than a splitter.
All the same, I’ll reserve the right to refer to our Friday lunches as “mom dates.”
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to.
- Scarf: Malo, mommed
- Dress: Mandy’s closet sale
- Tights: HUE
- Black Booties: Franco Sarto via Nordstrom’s
- Arm party of hair elastics I forgot to take off my wrist, again.
I’m a little behind these days (can’t imagine why), so these are actually from last Thursday . . . when I got all did up to steel myself for a “challenging” meeting, only to have it cancelled at the last second, leaving me relieved at not having to go, and amused at feeling like a walking style-blogger cliche, all dressed up and nowhere to go. We’ll pretend it made me more productive in the ensuing hours, after my schedule was all shot to hell. After all, don’t these shoes just scream scholarly to you?
. . . Right. Of course they do.
This dress is yet another attempt to incorporate more pre-loved items into my wardrobe, as I manage the “in transition” nature of my body, my budget and my closet at the moment. I snapped it up from Mandy’s closet sale a few weeks back (along with a fabulous pair of yellow shoes). While the fit isn’t perfect, it’s a great blank canvas for remixing, and I’m looking forward to taking advantage of its relative seasonlessness. It’s also a breastfeeding-friendly silhouette that works for both nursing and pumping (easier said than done), which is an added bonus. And come on, the vague shades of the late lamented crocodile hunter that I seem to be accidentally rocking are pretty hard to resist.
(Incidentally, my actual past adventures with crocodiles during the nearly two months I spent here were no joke. It’s a good story. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.)
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to.
- Teal Earrings: Mall vendor
- White Pashmina: Union Station vendor
- Tweed Sweater: Vintage Ralph Lauren, mommed
- Eye-Searing Orange Top: Olian via Nordstrom’s, gift from Mom
- Navy Cords: J.Crew, tailored (narrowly! ba dum, ching!) by yours truly
- Brown Riding Boots: Franco Sarto via Zappos
- Diaper(!) Bag: Storksak “Emily,” gift from parents, tip from Amy
If you were trying to be polite, you might refer to me as a creature of habit. There are less charitable variants. It’s true: much like my parents, I am the kind of person who craves routine, who finds a thing and sticks with it to—and often past!—the point where a reasonable person would explore other options. Often, at some point, I get sick of it and move on to something else, but I can last a surprisingly long time. It’s true of brands (sometimes), tv shows watched while on various forms of cardio equipment (Buffy, The West Wing), breakfast foods (Greek yogurt and maple syrup), and my non-coffee coffee order (tall sugar-free-vanilla extra-foam chai. Vestiges of my dark past as a barista, about which the less said, the better).
It’s also true of handbags. I realize it’s a big sartorial missed opportunity, but barring an extraordinary occasion, it’s rare that I gather the je ne sais quoi to move my stuff from one bag to another to match what I’m wearing. I suspect part of this is because I tend to carry around way, way, way, WAY too much stuff, with some morning organizational fails thrown in there for good measure. Baby m., for all of her enduring charms, helped with neither of these things.
Before and after baby arrived, we researched a variety of “diaper bag,” “non-diaper-bag-diaper-bag” and “non-diaper-bag-non-diaper-bag” strategies for carrying around m.’s necessities when we’re with her. We needed something that had enough separate pockets for all those baby-related things that somehow go missing, and most importantly, that wouldn’t require us to carry more than one bag (this eliminated the “diaper bag follows the child” approach, despite its gender-neutral appeal, because it seemed to result in me always carrying both a purse and the diaper bag, or discovering the next day that I’d left my wallet and/or cell phone in the diaper bag which was now with my husband or our nanny or my mother-in-law.). In news that shocks no one, all approaches have their shortcomings.
That said . . . when Amy tipped me off about the Storksak “Emily” bag, I heard little tiny cherubs rejoicing. It’s a purse! It’s a diaper bag! It has a plushy, ultralight changing pad in it! It has 8675309 pockets! It can be worn over the shoulder or cross-body! It’s large enough to hold a variety of baby pleasing-and-amusing essentials without being have-to-hang-it-on-the-stroller huge. You can still fit it on your shoulder while wearing the baby! It’s a soothing, non-black neutral! Bliss. Bliss in a diaper bag. Not a phrase I really imagined I’d be uttering . . . and yet.
And of course, true to form, it’s the bag I’ve carried 90% of the time since my parents gifted it to me at the end of last semester. By way of explanation, I’ll kick that one to the inimitable Paula Radcliffe: “I had a baby, not a personality transplant” . . .
Kind of.
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to.
- Blue Patterned Faux-Wrap Dress: Target
- Red Cardigan: Vintage Michael Kors, mommed
- Nursing Tank: Bravado Designs via Figure8Maternity.com
- Black Tights: HUE
- Black Boots: Born, gift from D.
- Belt: LOFT
- Necklace: gifted
- Arm party of hair elastics I forgot to take off
- Sniffly nose: gift from baby m.
The week, David Amsden style: baby m. is doing much better, but like all loving children, has used her newfound giggling abilities to transmit her cold to her devoted parents. My class schedule went through about 24952318 permutations during add-drop week. In honor of the momentous occasion of my last first day of school ever, I wore that red sweater that is (strangely) my power animal, even though it made my nose look even redder than it already was.
This dress is what Amy would call an “accidental Target” purchase: I went in looking for something else, saw it, and was struck by lightning/inspiration/my need for surplice necklines/the effect of too much Downton Abbey on my perception of ruffles and appear to have been overcome. And while I was initially sure I was going to return it (my approach with 95% of impulse purchases), it’s grown on me, to the point that it now feels destined to become a frequently remixed favorite. Or at least that it might become one, once I’ve gotten the baby spitup out of every. sweater. I. own…. In the meantime, I really like the pairing of bright red against the mottled blue, and the decidedly different effect of black boots over the brown riding boots I overwear tend to live in in the winter. While there are arguments for a black belt, the brown one has a slightly more casual vibe, and one that feels a little bit more me.
Did I mention it’s my last semester of law school, and almost definitely my last semester of school, ever? That I have thirteen weeks left? How did that even happen?
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to.
- Ubiquitous Black Jersey Dress: Ann Taylor
- Cream Cardigan: Halogen via Nordstrom’s, gift from Mom
- Suede Obi Belt: Garnet Hill, gift from SIL E.
- Black Nursing Cami: Bravado Designs via Figure8Maternity
- Black Tights: HUE
- Black Boots: Born, gift from husband D.
- Necklace: Gifted
- Earrings: Old Navy
This post could also be called “when you are engulfed in mucous,” or “dressing to impress medical professionals.” Much to our chagrin, baby m. has yet another cold (le sigh…). According to our pediatrician, it’s more theatrically spectacular than medically problematic, but it has still made for several quite long and messy days around here. We’re pulling out all the stops (or as many as you can at this age!), and keeping our fingers crossed that she rallies in the near future.
For a long time, black was the foundation of my closet. Then I bought a pair of brown riding boots, and it was more or less all downhill from there. I started cheating on black with other neutrals. I became less and less discriminating, falling hard and fast for grey, navy, and even off-white and camel. Then I got pregnant, and every list of maternity wardrobe essentials and pregnancy style advice I found urged me to build a wardrobe around slim black pants, black tank tops and drapey sweaters and I just rebelled. It was more than 95 degrees outside for many, many weeks of my pregnancy, and I was having none of this all black nonsense.
But now that Baby M. is thankfully outside of my insides (and much cuter for it), and the weather has cooled down considerably, black and I are beginning to reconcile. I still think black plays best when paired with other neutrals, or with other neutrals and an accent color, and I’m still on something of a break from black suits, and I still have to watch the tendency of too much black with my stark-white complexion to appear slightly vampiric. But with those caveats, black and I are making peace. Black, as it happens, can live up to some extraordinary demands, lending instant sophistication and credibility while having an obliging attitude towards spit-up stains, which, come to think of it . . . is a powerful metaphor for the state I’m in right now, don’t you think?
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to.
- Necklace: Gifted
- Earrings: Mall vendor
- Grey Cowl-Neck Tee: Filene’s Basement
- Aubergine Cord Skirt: Thrifted
- Black Belt: Ann Taylor
- Red Cardigan: Vintage Michael Kors, mommed
- Black Tights: HUE
- Black Boots (finally!): Born “Mallory,” holiday gift from D.
2012? Seriously?
I remember when I was applying to law school (back in the dark ages of the fall of 2008, which is now starting to seem like a really long time ago), D. and I looked at letters inviting me to apply for the Class of 2012, and the date sounded almost futuristic, like some kind of insane fantasy. 2012? That’s when some people think the world is going to end!
And yet, it seems that brave new world has arrived: even though I keep writing checks dated 2011, it is, in fact, January 2012, and my last semester of law school starts in a week. And while I’m not big on new years’ resolutions per se, I’ve definitely got a list on my mind of things I’d like to work on in the coming year:
- Make my last semester of school meaningful. I’m unlikely to ever be in school again, and I want to make it count. Separate and apart from my desire not to have “senioritis” affect my grades and jeopardize 2.5 years of hard work, I don’t believe in doing things halfheartedly, particularly not right now, as my time is so limited on all fronts. I still have some (actually, a lot) of big dreams out there and some things I need to be doing to keep them in the realm of possibility, and it’s worth remembering that. Even without the utilitarian aspects, I want to be intellectually engaged and alive to the moment.
- Get back to running — injury free. I’ve had so many false starts in my running career, but the physical changes associated with pregnancy, childbirth and recovery give me (a) a lot of healing to do and (b) a chance to start fresh. So for 2012, no big races (nothing longer than 10K), no crazy training plans, just safe, measured progress, and a lot of cross-training.
- Go more places with the little one. For a variety of reasons, including a dislike of chaos, I didn’t do a lot of venturing out on the days I was home by myself with Baby m. during the semester. Now that we have a little more help and I’ve picked up the pieces a bit more, I’m hoping I’ll get better at taking her places by myself on my non-working days.
- Go more places… without the little one. True confession: D. and I have only been out together without m. twice since she was born…3.5 months ago. Whether it’s going climbing together or just going to see a movie, it’s something we should do more of.
- Become a radical completionist. As evidence of my distractability, I can’t even begin to narrate what happened from when I sat down to write this and finally finished it. I have a huge to be filed file and a tendency to look at a task, contemplate it and then put it off, whether it’s postal mail, email, blog stuff, cleaning our house, writing, etc. It’s a lousy habit, and one that would restore hours back into my days and weeks if I could kick it.
- Meet my breastfeeding goals, but let them evolve as circumstances require. I didn’t expect that I’d be able to breastfeed, but it’s been a wonderful experience for us in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. It’s also one that’s required some Herculean efforts to make work (about which more later), but which I’m willing to keep doing (in a totally non-judgmental please just do what’s best for your family way!!).
- Honor my physical and emotional well-being…and my desire to get back in shape. This is easier said than done, but I’m working on it.
- Shop sanely and sustainably. I talked a little bit about this in the context of my commitment to thrifting more in the coming year, but there’s more to it than that: thinking critically about wants and needs, making investments that will last, not plunking down cash for things I don’t love and feel fabulous about.
- Be a confident parent and a present partner. Worth it for everyone’s sake. Also some stuff about reducing the amount of clutter in our house — physically and emotionally.
Where do you stand on new years resolutions? What are you most looking forward to in 2012?
I should add a brief post-script about this outfit: I have been looking for these boots for ages (thanks, D.!), and they were worth the wait. I still haven’t gotten over my thing about reds and aubergines. This skirt is an exception to the “never thrift things from Target” rule: the fit is iffy, but it’s a good quality garment that seems like it will last a while. Unlike this shirt, which has a spit-up stain the size of Texas on it that refuses to budge. Le sigh…
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to.
- Tweed Sweater: Vintage Ralph Lauren, mommed
- Heathered Tee: Liz Lange for Target
- Jeans: Old Navy
- Black Croc Wedges: Stuart Weitzman via Bloomingdale’s
- Red Belt: Forever 21
- Necklace: BeadleBop via Etsy.com
- Earrings: Mall vendor
My mom kind of hates this outfit, and she can’t believe I’ve belted her sweater. Sorry, mom. Win some, lose some.
I, on the other hand, kind of loved it. It fit the bill for the first of two blissful, largely-responsibility free days at home with baby m. after I finished my exams last week. I’m a serious skirts and dresses girl for work and school, but on my home-with-baby days, I’m falling back in love with pants: it really is just easier. Other things I love? That this tee is stretchy enough that it’s simple to nurse in without complicated layering gymnastics (and yup, it’s maternity…I’ve got one more day, right?). For purely practical reasons (and sometimes, form has to follow function), it’s hard to beat a sweater that layers well under a waterproof jacket for a rainy day.
…All of which was a really long way of saying, I got to be home (and just at home!) for the first time in ages! And I wore jeans and a tee-shirt! But really, it’s an illustration of a broader kind of boundary-blurring that I’ve been struggling with all term, and am hoping to get a handle on before classes resume in mid-January. While I occasionally fancy myself a high-quality binary deconstructor (though sadly, never as cool as this binary-smashing superhero, who I am apparently the last person on EarthTwitter to discover), I’m in serious need of some brighter lines between my work life and my home life. And I’m working on ways to get them, both inside and outside my head. I don’t need stone walls, nor am I likely (particularly after having a child, which is a whole other kind of boundary-blurring experience) to have a life totally devoid of the liminal. But I’d like to get to a place where, when someone asks if I’m “home” today, I can just say, “yes,” and not “yes, but I have to …”, both because that’s actually the answer and because it’s one I feel at peace with giving. The first is a time management issue, the second raises broader questions.
But hey! Look at my jeans and tee-shirt! “Home” need not mean unconscious, sartorially or otherwise. Fellow work-at-home types (or work-that-you-occasionally-take-home types): what are your best time managing, balance inducing, head-clearing strategies?
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to.
Hi! I'm S. Welcome to Narrowly Tailored, a blog about life and style from a law student and new mom. In short: work and life gets dressed; balance mostly gets amused.Follow Along
Affiliations
