One look at my baby’s dungarees was all it took to give me the rage

Why should he, an eight-month-old boy, have more pockets on his clothes than I do?

T

here’s much about becoming a new mother that could be filed under “maddening”. The phrase “sleep when the baby sleeps”. The way people stop asking how you are, instead only asking after the baby. The sheer volume of unsolicited advice – some barbed, some so painfully obvious it’s borderline offensive, and all of it totally inescapable. (I suppose I could try living on a desert island, though no doubt someone would send a plane to skywrite: “They’re probably just hungry!”)

But it was while doing the laundry last week that I found something truly unhinged. I was sorting my infant son’s clothes from mine when I noticed that he had more pockets on his clothes than I did. What exactly does an eight-month-old need with a tiny pocket? Is he supposed to keep something in there? A dummy? Bits of rice cake? All the sleep he’s stolen from me (in which case he’d need a bigger pocket)?

Pockets – or rather the lack of them – in women’s clothes are a well-known grievance. Historically, women weren’t given pockets because they weren’t expected to carry valuables, go anywhere or have autonomy. Later, pockets were rejected for the sake of appearance: they disrupted the line of a dress, their functionality ruining the fantasy of the woman as decoration. Instead, we were given the handbag – oh, great! another object to manage! – and even now, feminist scholars note that women’s pockets are often shallow, symbolic or fake.