I have not recycled my maternity coat. I no longer wear it with the zip-in front panel that added just the right space to protect my burgeoning belly and, later, my infant son, wrapped tightly in the baby sling I carried him in well into his preschool years. Ah, the things you can do when your child is in the 5th percentile for height and weight – the smallness that allowed me to wrap myself around him long after most mothers (of the other 95 percent) had to give up this pleasure.
My son is 12. He is an only child. This is a very long time to continue wearing maternity clothes of any kind. The coat is not an attempt to camouflage a remainder of baby or pregnancy weight; I am fit, healthy and in better shape than I was pre-pregnancy. I do not need a baggy, over-sized coat. I have no other maternity clothes. All were returned to the revolving door maternity shop they came from, and have, if my math is correct, clothed about a dozen other Mothers in the intervening years.
This black coat, roomy and soft, rain-resistant, lined, big enough to fit over a bulky sweater, big enough to zip up over a purse or computer bag, reminds me that once I walked this earth as a symbiotic twosome. I can’t fully remember the feeling of my ever-enlarging body. I thought with my belly, not my head. It led me around the way a man is led around by an erection – a body part that enters a room, a conversation or another person a good few seconds before the head or heart catch up. It was what many people saw before they saw my eyes.
Women only temporarily have this visible beacon, this way of drawing eyes and attention downward. This brief time where we can look down and marvel at our largess, at the growth, at the seemingly separate life that has sprung up where just moments ago there was only latent possibility. No wonder we worship the magic of a good stiff dick, brought to life – right here, right now.
I love the memories of the two-ness, how easy it was to walk, sing, talk, explain the world and our place in it to my son. I told him everything I knew before his ear buds were fully developed, before he could even chance to hear my words over the whooshing cacophony of my womb. Once born, I kept talking. He was so close, on my chest, on my hip, on my shoulder, on my belly, on my breasts, gripping my hair, my skin, my nipples in ways that were not always pleasant but the tug, the absolute certainty of his physicality, made such sense to me. It was the natural next step after having to share my lungs, heart beat, bladder, stomach, rib cage, pelvis with him.
I live now, and forever after, as a well-defined and singular self, much like we expect of adults. I will never achieve symbiosis again. No amount of my husband’s companionship, love, snuggles or penetration ever erases his separate selfhood. Nor should it. He is with me, but not of me. My son, who will always be of me, will be less and less with me. He will never experience what I did, will never have the chance to carry life within him.
We’ve got tartan flags, pride flags and freak flags, bumper stickers that proclaim for all the world the places we claim in outward identity and inner power. The bulky, spacious black Mama coat is my womb flag. It carries the memory of the way in which my unborn and then infant son and I filled it to capacity. In this soft spacious coat, we were, for the briefest of moments, a whole universe. Once I lived in the ultimate Motherland, even though now, and forever more, I reside in the land of Mom.