What To Wear

How four wise women helped me write a poem about clothing

Today’s poem is a new one I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. But it started percolating several months ago. Back in January I started building a new workout playlist. I asked my family to send me their favorite high energy tracks. My daughter’s suggestions included a few tunes from Olivia Rodrigo who she knew was more my cup of tea than Taylor. (No offense intended to you Swifties out there. I just prefer my pop with a bit more of an edge.)

Rodrigo’s “Pretty Isn’t Pretty” has become a favorite track of mine at the gym. It pisses me off, which is great for a sprint at the end of a run or five or six more reps. To hear this talented young woman sing about her insecurity about her looks, the lengths she’d go to feel pretty, the waste of her time and energy and the ultimate futility of it all is rage inducing. I makes me think of all the diets my mother attempted when I was a child, her constant battles against her shape and size, the clothing she clung to, taking up room in her tiny closet, despite it not having fit her in years. I think of the make-up I wore in middle school and high school, trying to hide my face, just as Rodrigo says in her opening line. And it makes me think of my daughter and her friends and how despite all the years between my girlhood and theirs, we’ve made so little progress.

There’s one bit at the end that always sticks in my head, because it resonates with so much truth and bitterness for me:

And I bought all the clothes that they told me to buy

I chased some dumb ideal my whole fucking life

And none of it matters, and none of it ends

You just feel like shit over and over again

No, it’ll never change

These words capture something so poignant because it is such an evergreen issue for women. Rodrigo may be singing to her peers, but her words are universal. From those early days in elementary and middle school, when we first start comparing our clothes to our classmates’, through each new “look” we attempt as teens and twenty somethings trying to figure who we are, through all the reinventions as our bodies change and age. If we have children we get a whole new body to dress along with everything else. Then it happens again with menopause. We spend countless hours steeped in this tea of anxiety and pressure about how we look and how the right clothing might make us believe in our worth.

A few months later I stumbled upon a post by

Hanne Blank Boyd

called Become Numberless all about sizes in clothing and how much importance we place on an arbitrary yet meaningless number. (This post is behind a paywall now, but a 7-Day free trial will let you read it and so many other thoughtful posts by the author.) Numbered sizes are a relatively recent addition to clothing and they vary widely by brand, by country. But we attach such significance to those infuriating numbers. They can become yet another misguided signifier of our worth.

“Pretty isn’t Pretty” and Become Numberless clicked together in my brain like magnets. There was a satisfying little “snick” sound and I started a Note on my phone titled Clothes. I made notes for another couple of months and then I started working on it in earnest a few of weeks ago.

Margaret Ann Silver

posted this piece about sweat as I was writing this poem and I felt like she must have had a window into my brain because no menopausal woman writes about clothing without also writing about sweat. Seeing her post was like a pat on the back, some friendly encouragement to keep going.

And then, just a week ago,

Amber Tamblyn

posted this fantastic piece on the theft of women’s time. Her jumping off point is the demoralizing heartbreak of the overturned Weinstein rape conviction. The larger focus is on how much of our time is spent fighting for rights and protections we should already have, how much of women’s creative energy is squandered. Legally, politically, medically we are playing a constant game of catch-up. As Tamblyn says:

“Women are so used to being robbed of our time, whether it's fighting for our rights, our voices, or our dignity. We have normalized the deficit of our energy as just a way of life nowadays.”

I heard another little click as I read this, one more piece fitting into place. The need to be everything else that we are, but also beautiful, youthful, and stylish is yet another theft of women’s time and energy. No to mention the very definition of beauty thrust upon us by patriarchal society. Preteens with multi-step skincare regimens, teenagers the target of anti-age marketing, new mothers urged to “get their bodies back” as if they had been lost rather than gorgeously transformed. And don’t get me started on menopause and the way women are medically, socially, and professionally sidelined as they age. We are wasting our time fighting for things that should be ours and working to meet some crazy ideal that was always meant to be unattainable so we would never be done, never arrive.

That’s how this poem came to be. Many thanks to these four wise women whose words helped me along the way.

---

What To Wear

I have never known 
	what to wear, what suits me, what fits
I never found 
	the Personal Style!
the magazines all tout-
	like a grail, 
	like a blessing
from the fashion gods

When I was young they’d ask me
	when are you going to dress like a grown up
Now I am grown and still I don’t know
	my colors
	my hemlines
	my perfect fit
If these garments are meant
	as armor or camouflage 

Near misses, blunders
	disasters
hang alongside old friends
that do more for my soul 
	than my shape

Just let the neckline be wide
	so I can breathe
I think, as I wipe the hot flash sheen 
from my face and feel it 
	soaking salty 
into the fabric of my shirt 

Just let it not pinch or bind
but let me see myself, 
	be myself 
when I turn to the mirror
	to the window
no better, no worse than how 
	I live in my mind

Is there a fabric that could
	clothe all of me?
A drape that would flatter
	without fracturing
the various parts that make up
	my whole
Is body conscious not a style	
but a whole host of expectations
I cannot take off even just 
to toss them in the wash

What if I threw them all away
	the failed experiments
	the new looks
	the new leaves turned in hope
Piled them in the yard
Set them on fire 
and watched,
	naked, 
as they burned to ashes

The jeans designed
 	to lift my butt
	flatten my stomach 
would melt rather than burn, 
made from alchemical fibers 
designed to change 
	my lead to gold. 
The gauzy tents I pitched to hide 
my menopausal curves
	 would crackle, 
sending up flames to the clouds, 
and I could toast marshmallows 
	over their coals, 
soft and white like this flesh, 
basking in their heat,	
	fingers and lips sticky with sugar
tongue tasting 
	a longed for sweetness

---

What I’m Reading:

A very kind lady of my acquaintance drew a comparison between my poetry and a poem by Irish poet, Eavan Boland, called The Pomegranate. I found the poem right away and read it, feeling very flattered, indeed. It was a very generous compliment and after a moment of feeling unworthy, I went immediately to the library and found two volumes of Boland’s poems: The Historians and New Collected Poems. They are beautiful and very inspiring.

Thank you all for reading!