Pants for the memories

We're delighted and proud that the wonderful writer, journalist and Woman Who Knows Daisy Buchanan has offered to write for us occasionally. This month she blogs about Mum Pants - big pants by another name...

At 30, I’ve finally accepted the Mum Pants into my life

I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know who made every single pair of my pants - but I do know who my best pants belong to.

My favourite pair of knickers has a name tape sewn into the back. If I ever get invited to any orgies, I have nothing to worry about - at the end, I’ll be able to tackle the sexy lost property cupboard with efficiency and speed. Although if it’s a masked affair, I guess it’s going to be impossible to stay anonymous.

It was my Mum’s idea. A couple of Christmasses ago she stumbled upon the old name tapes she’d ordered for my sisters and me - I think they were in a cupboard filled with nearly empty paracetamol packets from the early nineties, or possibly nestling among a collection of Tupperware boxes which no longer have lids. She had an idea. She bought us all a pair of pants to go in our stockings - all slightly different, but crafted in the same spirit. She looked for sturdy undergarments in muted colours and robust fabrics. Pants to cover your nipples. Pants that would not embarrass a 12th century martyr who had dedicated their lives to the pursuit of modesty and the elimination of bodily sin. Pants that, were the wind to blow your skirt up over your head, would make you look more clothed than you appeared in the first instance. Mummy pants.

At 30, I have spent a decade working out what I want from my underwear, and doing everything I can to distance myself from the Mummy Pants. As a teen, my knickers were bought to promote modesty, chastity and economy. My knickers had a message for the world - and that message was ‘I spend at least one weekend a month involuntary helping nuns to run a Bring and Buy sale’. No boy was ever going to see them - and if they did, I’m convinced they would then spend the rest of their life remembering them every time they had an inappropriate erection and needed it to go down.

In the textbook Catholic girl fashion, as soon as I was in a position to buy my own pants, I embraced man made fibres like a person who had just time travelled from the second world war. I may as well have walked up to shop counters and said “Got anything guaranteed to trigger a severe yeast infection? I’ll take five pairs!” My favourite pants were part of a £7 Miss Selfridge multibuy, and were black, trimmed with hot pink lace and bore the retro, rainbow legend ‘DISCO THONG’. They went so far up my bum that if I sat down too fast I had to spend 30 seconds doing some slow, meditative breathing in order to recover.

I often think that when we’re young and don’t know who we are, we’re like pinballs. We grow up presented with one truth, and as soon as we have the energy and power we’re hurtling away from it, knocking ourselves against the opposite wall and some sense is knocked into us, and we’re ready to hurl ourselves in another direction. We have to keep bashing our corners off until we find a balance. It took me a long time to learn that just because I rejected industrial strength Catholic pants, it didn’t mean I was a DISCO THONG girl.

Now the Catholic pants are back in my life, but I want them there. Not every day, but on the occasions where I need to be reminded of who I am, and where I have come from. I’m loved, and I’m lucky. There’s someone in the world who doesn’t think that, as an adult woman, I have to look and behave a certain way. They just want me feel cosy, secure and confident on windy days, in pants so good, they have my name in them.