Back when the acronym DINKY (‘Double income no kids’) was first around, I invented one of my own for people like us – SLINKY – ‘Single lousy income numerous kids’.
Life was good and we lacked for nothing that mattered, but there weren’t many dollars in the bank at the end of each fortnight. Despite this, when I was heavily pregnant with our third baby, I bought what felt at the time to be a luxury item – a soft, white towelling robe that cost $60 – purchased on a rare trip to Melbourne from the Western District town where we lived.
It was the kind of garment that stars wore in movies, that sleek looking couples in ads for luxury hotels got about in. I thought I was the bees’ knees. I had bought it with the idea that I would have something respectable for my hospital stay, and some of the first photos of our little son show him wrapped in my arms and me wrapped in the snowy luxury of my glamorous new robe.
Once I was no longer pregnant it was too big, but that only made me feel more protected and sheltered in it and it was a perfect colour to camouflage the drips of baby sick that were a permanent feature of my shoulders in those years. It rapidly became one of my favourite garments. Towards the end of my fourth pregnancy, it fit perfectly once more, and the two oldest children took to calling me ‘the great white haystack’.
The baby whose birth I bought it for is now 21; that dressing gown has never been replaced and is still my most comforting thing to wear. Having just been home for a week and forced to have my feet up much of the time, some mornings I haven’t bothered to get dressed at all, but have happily lounged around it in all day. Yesterday I had to wash it, as the collar and cuffs were no longer white but a dirty grey-brown, and I hung it lovingly on the line for the kind sun to bleach it back to creamy white.
These days, even when it’s fresh off the clothesline, it is a shadow of its former self. There’s a small rip in the front that I’ve never bothered to fix, maybe because I like working my fingers through it when I’m talking on the phone. Where the collar meets the back wore through years ago, and I patched it; now the patch itself has worn out. In several places, the towelling has completely disappeared, leaving bald, thin cotton. But it is soft, so soft, soft in the way that only very old cloth can be.
Over the years I have had a few of these garments that are so old and well washed that they positively caress you when you put them on. My old dressing gown is still a couple of sizes too big, and when I belt it tight, it feels as though a dear old friend is putting their arms around me. Shrugging it on brings back memories of pregnancy and breast-feeding and years of the children coming into our big bed for a cuddle every morning.
I love the fact that still, in a completely different phase of my life, I feel consoled and sheltered by this shabby old piece of material. These days most of our kids have left home and we are both in paid jobs; if I wanted to replace my robe with a flash new model, I could easily afford to. But that’s not going to happen until it falls apart comprehensively. And even then, I doubt I’ll throw it out. It will be kept in a high cupboard, along with a few of the kids’ baby clothes – a talisman against a world in which the shiny new is always assumed to be better.