Wednesday, March 20, 2013

My Love Story With Pink

I have never seen myself as a girl mom. Having been quite a tomboy myself, with a wardrobe full of jeans, black, and the quite lonely splash of red or blue (yes, I was able to get dressed in complete darkness and still rely on being dressed appropriately) and a healthy dislike of pink and frills, I was seeing myself chasing soccer balls with my sons.

When we were pregnant for the first time, I asked Richard to not find out the gender as I wanted a surprise at the end. To be honest, I was so thankful when he came back from the bathroom to announce the two blue lines (yes, I was so chicken that I peed on the stick and ran) that it really didn't matter if we would have a boy or a girl. Our first feeling was "girl", but as the pregnancy commenced, I let myself be convinced that we would most definitely have a boy (carrying low, carrying small, and all the other old wive's tales). We prepared neutral and decided to get the gender-specific outfits later; to be honest, we didn't get much of anything clothes-wise, since my friend had given me couple of bags of her hand-me-downs from her son so we would definitely get through the first couple of weeks (and baby wouldn't care what she would wear anyways).

Come February 2, 2008, when after almost 60 hours of labor (could a girl do something like that to her mommy??) at 12:40pm I got to hold our DAUGHTER for the first time. I have to admit, there was a split-second of shock when the doctor announced that we had a girl. But then, there was only bliss to be able to hold our healthy child and having given my husband the daughter he wanted.

At this moment, I was re-born as a girl mom; I didn't know it yet, but I was. I left the hospital in black pants and sweater, a black diaper bag, and our little girl in brown sweat pants, beige sweater with a teddy on it, and a Whinnie The Pooh hat. Yes, at this point, someone had already congratulated us on our "cute little boy". A few days after her arrival, my co-workers threw me a surprise baby shower at the office, where I was presented, among others, with a PINK diaper bag. My co-worker, who has three boys and always wanted a girl, insisted, that a GIRL mom needed a PINK diaper bag. I believe it took me a few days until I could make myself use it for the first time, I just wasn't a pink girl, was I?

And that was when the flood of pink outfits arrived, and after a while, they weren't even that bad any more.. I even started LIKING them and cooing over those adorable little outfits myself. What the heck was wrong with me? And then, the day came where I got my first pink item of clothes myself, just to match with our little girl and show to the world that I was indeed a proud girl mom.

I would have never thought that motherhood would change me so much, but it did. I'm still not fashionable, a jeans and t-shirt girl that is horrible at accessorizing. But I have a wardrobe now where I cannot get dressed in the dark any more. I have embraced a female side about me that I have not known existed before I had a daughter. Don't get me wrong, our closets is not flooded with pink everything (having a daughter named "Violet", you may take a lucky guess regarding the main color in her closed), but we three girls do indeed enjoy some well-dosed pink every once in a while.

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