Dear Maternity Chain Outlet,
When I came into your store with my wife, she was three months’ pregnant and barely showing but had just hit that auspicious precipice where none of her pants would button. What the heck was she going to wear to work? We made a panicked beeline to the mall.
One’s first sojourn to the maternity store is a signpost along the road to Babytown that drives home the fact that your life is about to change. It’s also a wallet-opening initiation to the insidious Maternity Industrial Complex. When you’re new to the baby game, it’s understandable that you’d have no idea how to navigate this unfamiliar terrain. It’s easy to see how one might try throwing money at the problem as a way of regaining some semblance of calm. Everything seems like it’s gonna be fine — until your wife can’t fit into her pants. This is not a problem one can ignore. Or try to ignore it, and see how that goes.
“Maternity denim” costs hundreds of dollars.
Your well-lit retail space houses abundant racks of regular-looking jeans that have been cleverly modified at the waistline. Instead of buttoning shut, a stretchy band of Lycra extends upward that’s meant to be pulled over the curvature of an ever-expanding belly. It’s an ingenious adaptation, but one the consumer pays dearly for, assuming you’re like us and don’t have the skills to sew your own damn Lycra on jeans you already own. “Maternity denim” costs hundreds of dollars, with less-cool discounted options lurking around the edges. We also found long shirts designed to seamlessly obscure the orthopedic-looking pants-securing mechanism. Doubtlessly, the ruse is to catch your customers in a moment of panic. (“Help! My wife needs pants!). A devious ambush.
The exciting news is that the more credit card debt we accrue, the more “Bump Bucks” we accumulate. I’m not totally sure what one does with “Bump Bucks,” but I really like saying/writing Bump Bucks.
Now try to say “Bump Bucks” five times fast.
Something else I appreciated from the experience was the effusively friendly saleslady who genuinely seemed to enjoy her job. She greeted us with the question, what brings you here today? Which, we later discovered, is probably the most tactful interaction we’ve had with anyone regarding our pregnancy. The implication being that everyone walking into the store might not be pregnant. Some non-preggers folks just like how maternity clothes fit them. They love the Lycra! This is in stark contrast to, months earlier, the lady handing out cheese samples at Berkeley Bowl who, when asked, “Is this cheese pasteurized?” whined loudly to everyone in earshot, “Why…because you’re PREGNANT?”—which my wife, who was, indeed, a few weeks pregnant (a fact she had not shared with anyone but me), did not appreciate.
It’s a stupid idea to assume someone is pregnant or, for that matter, to assume you can guess which partner of a couple (or thruple) is pregnant. No matter how obvious it looks. So props to the maternity chain-store saleslady — or to your enlightened corporate culture that crafted her sensitivity training.
Our oh-so-helpful saleslady talked us through a variety of offerings. Maternity bikinis — so many options to consider! Nipple creams — crucial! Maternity underwear?
Uh…wait a second.
The Maternity Chain-Store Saleslady cheerfully explained, “When you start getting bigger, regular underwear won’t stay on anymore. It starts to slip off. This happens to lots of pregnant women.”
Me, the ever-inquisitive husband: “Really? The underwear falls off?”
Maternity Chain-Store Saleslady: “Yes, regular underwear will fall right off. So you need this maternity underwear, which is designed to stay on!”
Me (turning to wife): “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Maternity Chain-Store Saleslady: “You’ll see!”
Now we’re both trying to visualize a scenario in which an unassuming pregnant lady is walking around, doing her thing and…whooooosh, her non-maternity underwear plummets to her ankles. Needless to say, it could be a serious tripping hazard and inconvenient for a variety of other reasons. Clearly, it’s a pitfall to avoid at any cost. But regardless of what this guru of gestational garb assures us, we can’t imagine a pair of underwear falling asunder. Surely she knows better than we do?
The inquiry begs for a cursory web search, evidently revealing that this is not impossible, albeit under extraordinary circumstances:
This issue also brings to mind the illustrious and under-appreciated work of Art Frahm, a Chicago-based artist active in the 1940s–1960s who is best known for his Norman Rockwell–esque illustrations of women’s panties spontaneously falling off in medias res in everyday life.
Whereas before I saw Frahm’s work as whimsical cheesecake—the Chicken Little of underwear falling, if you will—perhaps all along he was the Newton of underwear (“What comes up must come down!”), trying to send an urgent warning to the urban working women of the future.
As much as I would like to believe in a fantastical world in which gravity has a stronger pull on underwear material than other matter in the universe, alas, Frahm’s visual meditations on quantum physics (a.k.a. “G-String Theory”) and thermoelastic dynamics don’t hold up under the rigors of the scientific method. Nor under the auspices of our everyday lived experience.
Which brings us back to the maternity store and its attendant saleslady.
Maybe she was a victim of employee brainwashing? Or perhaps she deviously pushed maternity underwear on us in an attempt to reach her monthly quota of Bump Bucks (I heard her talking quotas on the phone with her manager — I’m onto your schemes!), weaving a false narrative in an attempt to take advantage of vulnerable parental neophytes.
I am proud to say we pulled ourselves together in that moment. My wife and I acted as a unit and bravely followed our intuition that something was rotten in the state of Denmark. We bought the jeans and a sexy pair of cutoff-jeans maternity shorts (for that “knocked-up spring-break look”), but agreed that the $18 pairs of underwear were something that we’d “think about.” In the ensuing months, we’ve dared to enter the seventh circle of hell that is Buy Buy Baby, ordered a snotsucker on Amazon, bought a gently used luxury stroller at a fraction of the retail price and inherited bassinet-loads of adorbs hand-me-downs.
And through it all, careening (now waddling) into month 9, not once has she sensed the subtle swoosh of faltering feminine fabric fluttering feetward. Not even one moment, belly swelling ever larger, has my wife reported any inclination to doubt the structural integrity of her underwear.
You ply us with fear, the fear of underwear falling. Is there any low you won’t stoop to in order to bolster your bottom line? It’s time someone took a stand against this scaremongering. To all women in the world, I declare as your humble ally, “Keep wearing your regular underwear!” or “Buy new underwear if you want/need it!” or…um…my point isn’t to tell anyone what to do, underwear-wise or otherwise. All I’m saying is that whatever you do, don’t believe it when they tell you that the underwear you already have is going to fall off. It’s not going to fall off.
