How to dress for motherhood

Are these your pants? If so, you may be a victim of mom jeans
 
When you’re juggling kids and other responsibilities, like work or school, it’s difficult to find time to keep up with the latest fashion trends. Here are some tips to help the contemporary mom achieve a timeless look.

Yoga pants
I keep seeing this commercial for yoga pants lately. It shows a mom bustling around doing mom stuff in her yoga pants while a voice-over says something like, “If you can’t fade, then your yoga pants can’t either! No pressure, though.”

Yoga pants are in. They’re perfect for the mom who swings by the yoga studio every day after dropping her kids off at school. You can even wear them to the grocery store afterwards; everyone will be admiring your yoga butt in your yoga pants. For the rest of us, however — the moms who don’t have the time or money to go to yoga class every day because we have other shit to do — yoga pants are perfect for when you don’t care what pants you’re wearing, so long as you’re wearing pants. Sweatpants are a similarly incredible achievement in mom clothing.

Mom jeans
Baby belly? What baby belly? You can’t see it because I’m hiding it under my high-waisted mom jeans! High-waisted jeans recently made a comeback, but don’t quote me on that. I vaguely remember reading an article that said that high waisted pants were back in style. I can’t remember if it was this year or four years ago, though, because I don’t give a shit.

Pre-pregnancy jeans that fit again
And by “fit again,” I mean, “you can zip them up.” They may be tighter and more uncomfortable than they used to be. Maybe they were already pretty old and worn out before you got pregnant and it was time to get new ones, anyway. They may be completely impractical in every way, but you’re still going to wear them because they’re your pre-pregnancy jeans and you can zip them up.

Nursing bras
If you want to look like a character in a sci-fi porno movie, then put on a black nursing bra and just leave the flaps open. They don’t really serve any other purpose. They don’t offer any support for your boobs, which if kind of the whole point of bras. The whole point of nursing bras, on the other hand, is to provide easy access to your breasts; if you’re wearing a nursing bra and you’re thinking to yourself, “It feels like I’m not even wearing a bra!” it’s because you’re kind of not, even if you did remember to close the flaps.

Absent-minded outfits
When you’re a parent, sometimes you don’t have time to care about things like getting dressed and you forget to do things like put on a clean shirt or change out of your pajama pants. Maybe you end up wearing things inside out because you weren’t paying attention. I will never forget the time that I went for a walk with my son and decided to stop somewhere for breakfast and then realized that I couldn’t take my coat off because I wasn’t wearing a shirt.

Of course, there’s always the first clean shirt that you could find after your kid peed on you. And then there’s that baggy maternity top that you never wanted to see again. So, basically, you can wear that, or you can walk around smelling like urine all day. The choice is yours! ■