Book Excerpt: Designer Dana Buchman’s "A Special Education"

The Wonder Year

Some people, when faced with a major life change, make a conscious effort to slow everything else down. A woman who’s having a child for the first time might decide to lighten her load at work. Someone who is taking on new responsibilities in her job might hold off on starting a family that year.

I have never been one of those people.

For most of my life, I have been a serious doer, undaunted by the notion of having too much on my plate. If anything, I would jump at the chance to juggle more for all the world to see. I had been encouraged early on by my mother and my grandmother to be a high achiever, and I got hooked on the accolades they showered on me. I wanted to be a superwoman, the embodiment of the “having-it-all’ feminist ideal that became so popular when I was in college in the 1970s.

A Special Education

If there was ever a year when I got to shine, it was 1986, probably the most action-packed and thrilling year of my life. I did it all then: I was newly married to my husband, Tom; we had our first daughter, Charlotte; and the Dana Buchman designer label was born. I had everything I had ever wanted. It was a series of dreams come true. I had this amazing husband — not only handsome but brilliant, loving, and supportive of my career! Then, I received the offer of a lifetime for a young designer, the chance to have my own label. It was practically handed to me on a silver platter by my mentor and boss, Liz Claiborne. (The Dana Buchman label is owned by Liz Claiborne, Inc.) To top it all off, I gave birth to this perfect, beautiful little creature whom I just loved instantly.

Could it get any better? My life was picture-perfect — on the outside, at least. People thought, “Look at her, keeping it all together, doing everything at once with so much grace and style.” On the inside, though, I was a bit of a mess, and I didn’t even know it. I was so out of touch with my emotions, so into living the dream and seeming “perfect,” that I don’t think I even knew how overwhelming it all was. Here I was, under tremendous pressure to prove myself in designing my first collection, and at the same time, I was just learning how to care for a baby. These were two insanely demanding endeavors unto themselves, let alone in combination.

It was in the next year, when Tom and I started to notice that there was something amiss with Charlotte and her development, that it started becoming harder for me to hold it all together. The idyllic picture of my “perfect” life began to pixelate like a frozen image when the DVD player gets stuck. In the years that followed, that picture would take on a different hue, colored by the experience of having a child with serious learning differences (LD) and motor deficiencies.

That Girl From Memphis

My adult life has been shaped by many things. Being the mother of a child with LD has turned out to be one of the major, defining details. It’s been a rigorous education — nineteen years and counting. And now it’s hard to recall a time when LD-speak wasn’t a part of my vocabulary.

Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1950s and 1960s, I can assure you I never heard the term learning difference, or even the less politically correct learning disability. Back then, unfortunately, the kids who had difficulty reading and spelling and doing math were labeled the “dumb kids.” Knowing what I do now about LD — how it is the result of different brain wiring rather than a lack of intelligence -- I tend to think many of those kids were probably pretty bright, and it breaks my heart to think of the kids I and others judged unfairly.

Me, I was always near the top of the class, an A student who loved sitting at the front of the classroom, raising my hand for the teacher to call on me. I was the youngest of three kids in a family that placed a high value on academic achievement.

My mother never worked but was an avid reader. I remember her reading Plato when I was quite young, telling us to be quiet because it was very difficult. At one point, she offered to pay me $50 if I’d read Shelby Foote's The Civil War (I did!), but bribing me was rare; mainly she just inspired me to read by her example. At 60, she enrolled in Memphis State University to get her master's degree in English. I was an undergraduate English major at Brown University at the time and had just learned to write papers. Ironically, my mother would send hers to me for guidance and correction. From my father, I got a strong — almost fierce — work ethic. A child of the Great Depression, "Whirly," as I called him once I got too old for "Daddy," worked very hard. He was a co-owner of a steel-fabricating plant. The plant opened at 7 a.m., and my dad was there, right on time, every morning. My parents awoke at 5:30 a.m., and at 6 a.m., my mother brought breakfast upstairs on a tray. We kids were always welcome to join them for breakfast, piling onto their big bed or perching ourselves on their armchairs with pieces of the morning paper. It's probably no surprise that I've always been a morning person, getting up at the crack of dawn, getting to work early.

My father wasn't all business, though. He spent a lot of time with his family. He loved tennis and canoeing and entertaining with my mother. And he liked to paint watercolors. I think I may have gotten my artistic nature from him.

I didn't always know I wanted to be a designer, although one of the first ways I made money was sewing custom leather hippie clothing in college. What can I tell you, it was the 1970s. I fell in love with both literature and art while at Brown. Ultimately, art won out, and that led me in the direction of fashion. After I graduated, I took some courses in fashion design at the Rhode Island School of Design, which was just down the street from Brown, and St. Martin’s School of Art in London, which was an adventure that gave me a new perspective on my limited experiences at that time.

My year in London was life changing. The St. Martin's course was a total immersion in design. We spent hours at the Victoria and Albert Museum studying Chinese porcelains and African masks and whole days visiting art galleries looking at contemporary art, and we walked miles throughout the year keeping up with the hippest boutiques. I have never sketched so much since that year -- nonstop, project after project. I went through reams of paper, boxes of pens, whole packages of colored pencils. It was intense and exciting. The St. Martin's teaching philosophy was that everything visual can become an inspiration for fashion design -- art, ballet, street people. After the four years of academic, intellectual life at Brown, this called on completely different senses — visual, aesthetic, tactile. I loved it.

Going abroad really opened my eyes, although it didn't expose me to the variety of learning styles in the world. That education would come later, courtesy of Charlotte.

Two years after graduating from Brown and with some very whimsical, fantastical student sketches in my portfolio, I embarked on a three-week job search.

I pounded the pavement of New York City's Garment Center day after day, ducking between the men pushing wardrobe racks along the sidewalks, from one company to another, before I finally landed a job as a junior designer at a small sportswear company. Once I found work, I was on my way. I found a huge, bohemian loft in Tribeca to live in — with no real bathroom and no buzzer from downstairs — so I felt like a cool, downtown New York chick. I was loving life, working hard, and playing hard, sometimes staying out all night at loft parties or at Tribeca's legendary dive, the Mudd Club.

Having It All

One position led to the next, which led to six years working with Liz Claiborne as a knitwear designer. And that ultimately brought me to my own brand. Liz Claiborne and her husband, Art Ortenberg, had decided to add a higher-end label and asked if I would design the collection. They actually asked me if I would be willing to put my name on it. Willing? Willing!

This was a Cinderella dream — what every young designer longs for. I had worked hard since I got out of school. The fashion business is cutthroat and difficult to get ahead in, but I just kept at it. In my years working as a knitwear designer for Liz Claiborne, I put in long, long hours, traveled to factories in Asia, sometimes as often as nine times a year. In that time, I got to work closely with Liz. I admired her tremendously, and we became good friends. But I never dreamed that would lead to her and Art offering me my own label. I was over the moon.

I got pregnant shortly after I received the offer. Soon, I would be living out the feminist fantasy from my college days — I'd be a high-powered career woman, but that wouldn't interfere with my being a wife and a mother, too.

So there I was, 35 years old, with a new husband, a new company, and a new baby on the way. I was exhilarated. I felt proud, powerful, and optimistic. It would be a long time before I would realize just how difficult some of the aspects of this "having-it-all" lifestyle were. For the moment, I was convinced that I was creating an example for other women to follow.

Showtime

I loved being pregnant. It was a wonderful pregnancy — a little bit of morning sickness the first three months, then nothing. It was an exciting time for Tom and me. We were still in the blush of new romance, and we reveled in our adoration for and support of one another.

I worked until two weeks before Charlotte was born. I wanted and needed to tie up all my loose ends as a knitwear designer for Liz Claiborne so that I would have a clear head for my new label — a challenge we agreed I'd take on when I returned from maternity leave. Beyond logistics, I also felt it was important to let nothing slip — as part of my feminist duty to show that pregnancy needn't interfere with a working woman's ability to do her job. I'd eat two huge lunches at work — one at 11 a.m. and one at 2 p.m. Then, I'd eat an early dinner — again a mountain of food — and be so totally exhausted I'd fall asleep between bites. Literally, I'd find myself nodding off as I was eating. I knew that once the baby was born, I would go back to work. In those days, that wasn't a given. Everyone asked, "Are you going back to work?" It was still a new thing for moms to return to their careers.

As my pregnancy progressed, though, and I finished up my work, I noticed something very interesting -- the career piece of the equation became slightly less appealing to me. I wavered. One minute I was jumping for joy about my new label. The next, I was lamenting how tough the fashion business is. I'd been in the business long enough to know it was very competitive. An infinite number of factors determined whether a designer was successful or not, besides drawing beautiful clothes. There were also fit, fabric, quality, shipping on time, and perception of the retailers and customers, to name a few. So many wild cards. Maybe I was just having career anxiety. This would be my most difficult design task to date. It wasn't designing a couple of individual garments, it was creating a whole new label, a collection — determining how dressed up, how casual, how sporty, how refined, what price point, how luxurious. I worried, What if nobody liked what I designed for the Dana Buchman line?

At some point before I went back to work, my fears escalated, and I started to have moments of real, sharp anxiety. It was intense. I was "on" 24 hours a day. There was so much to be done, so much that was new, that I was doing for the first time. And it all had to be right, it all had to be "fabulous." The rush of adrenaline never left my body. I was on the phone to Asia and Italy in the evening, sketching in the middle of the night, and working on the prototypes and with stylists for the show itself during the day. It was heady, magical, the stuff that dreams are made of. I was never tired because I was so excited. I was anxious and fearful that it wouldn't be good.

I kept these feelings to myself. I realized that if I failed, it would be a very public failure. I'd be letting down Liz and Art, my friends, my mentors, my surrogate parents. I'd be losing money for my fellow employees at Liz Claiborne, as well as the shareholders. How embarrassing. I ran through mental scenarios from hell: the launch fashion show ends and the audience sits there stock still, horrified at the collection...

Bringing Up Baby

Long before I didn't know what it was like to have a child with LD, I didn't know what it was like to have a child at all. If you can believe it, all the time I was pregnant and enjoying those pregnancy hormones, I thought very little about what it would be like to have a baby. I was so wrapped up in work, the whirl of thinking about my own collection, of being a newlywed.

Babies were unfamiliar territory. I had only one woman friend in New York City, and she didn't have any children. None of my colleagues and acquaintances at work had babies. I hadn't held many infants in my life up to that point.

All this is to say, I had no idea how much in love with Charlotte I'd be from the minute she arrived. My baby was the most fascinating thing I had ever seen. It was almost comic to me how I'd instantly transformed from being totally indifferent to babies to being totally mesmerized. It must be nature's way of maintaining the species. It was a total, hormonal, undeniable, full-body change in my very being: I just wanted to be with Charlotte. All the time.

It came over me the moment I held her in the delivery room. I had never felt anything like this. It was just like in the movies. I cried at the miracle of birth (that was before the painkiller wore off from my Caesarean, and I began crying from pain). I marveled at the wonder of it all. All of a sudden, I got it; I knew what it was to feel like a mother.

But along with the joy, the pride, the love, I felt a sense of being in the dark. I didn't know how to take care of babies; I didn't know they cried so frequently; I had never experienced diaper rash; I didn't know what supplies I needed; I didn't know when to be worried or when something was not such a big deal, like cradle cap or a crispy umbilical cord drying up and falling off. There was a whole vocabulary and range of experiences I had no knowledge of and was terrified to encounter. Sweaters — ask me anything about sweaters and I can tell you. Babies — not a clue.

In fact, you'd think I hadn't been expecting a baby at all, from how ill prepared I was for Charlotte's actual arrival. When I went to the hospital to deliver her, I brought no clothes to take her home in. And it was a cold October day. So the designer's daughter had to wear a hospital-issue stocking cap, and, luckily, they let us take the blanket she had been using in her hospital crib.

I was truly out of my element. I wasn't prepared for the crying, the waking up several times in the night for feedings, the sleep deprivation. Charlotte was colicky. There were just these long, inexplicable crying jags, and I could do nothing to stop her. It sounds silly, but no one told me about these aspects of having a baby. I felt like I'd missed an important year at school where they covered the topic.

I felt so disappointed that my otherwise beautiful, relaxed, calm, smiling, heavenly infant — this child who filled me with an instant suffusion of love — would turn into a purple-red, tightly wound ball of rage and pain from hell. What was wrong with me, I wondered, that I couldn't comfort my child. What was wrong with her that my overwhelming love couldn't comfort her?

I managed, as always, to keep a cool exterior. But, internally, I was losing my calm. What internal misery was making that little body convulse in distress? I'd get tired. Empathy would fade, replaced by despair, and, then, anger would begin to well up inside. Anger was the emotion I couldn't stand, the emotion I was never supposed to have, let alone exhibit. I'd just hold it in and struggle with my frustration over having no idea how to handle this.

Eventually, this unease, this not knowing, abated as far as the day-to-day care went. But it was to return when Charlotte's rate of development became a serious issue at age three. It's been part of my life ever since.

Back To Work

Charlotte was born in October. Two months later, in December, I went back to work to launch my new label. That was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Of course, I was excited about my new company, but my grief at leaving my baby each day was all encompassing.

That March, when Charlotte was five months old, I had to take a nine-day trip to Italy to shop for fabrics for my collection. I'll never forget how hard it was for me to get on that plane. It was an undeniable career demand, but aside from the pain of leaving Charlotte, I had another problem: I was still nursing.

When breastfeeding, I felt like an archetypal, mythical good mother. Charlotte had needs, and I could fulfill them — the opposite of the feelings evoked by her colic. Women in prehistoric times had done this, as had the ancient Greeks, the Romans, my grandmothers. I was joined with the mothers of all ages.

In order to keep the milk going, I had to pump while in Italy. I went out and bought a portable plastic pump. I will never forget the first night, in the bathroom of the fantastic Excelsior Hotel in Florence, trying to pump. I couldn’t work the darn thing. It kept falling apart into the sink. Here I was, in one of the most beautiful, old luxury hotels in the world, surrounded by magnificent furnishings, marble, heavy drapes, and majestic high ceilings, and all I felt was grief and inadequacy and loneliness. I wasn't with my baby or my sweet husband. I was way over there in Italy, and I couldn't even work the breast pump.

I recall sobbing into the marble sink. The period of breastfeeding was officially over. I felt deeply sad and alone. And I had an inkling that my big career was going to exact a heavy price.

It Takes A Village

As soon as I got pregnant, Tom and I knew that we would need full-time, live-in help. The demands of my work were huge. In addition to my full-time office hours, I needed to travel several times a year to yarn shows in Florence, fabric shows in Paris, factories in Asia. I needed the flexibility to be able to go into work early or to stay late with little notice. Tom had taken three months off between jobs in law firms when Charlotte was born, and he'd be going back to an even more demanding job than the one he'd left. We needed a live-in nanny

.

Although I knew that this was necessary, I felt a little funny about it. There would be a stranger living with us. And she would spend more time with my child than I would. I wondered if Charlotte would identify with this new, strange person as her mother rather than me. I was also self-conscious that it might seem like some extravagant indulgence. Would the nanny see me as spoiled? Would other people? But really, there was no other way to juggle my job and motherhood.

Tom put an ad in the Irish Echo, a small weekly newspaper catering to the Irish community in New York. We found a lovely young Irish woman who was just moving to New York. She came to live with us when Charlotte was just a month old. But she didn’t last long — she went home to Ireland for Christmas and didn't come back.

We went back to the Irish Echo, and it led us to Monica Lowe, a lovely Jamaican woman who is still very much involved with helping us take care of Charlotte and her younger sister, Annie, and with helping to manage Charlotte's LD.

I learned so much from Monica from the very beginning. She was a mentor to me in the world of childrearing. I mentored young designers at work, and she mentored me at home. She was totally relaxed. She wasn't afraid of breaking Charlotte. She wasn't afraid of her crying, her colic. Her whole body language was relaxed. She laughed easily. I felt totally confident that she would look after Charlotte with all the care I would -- but with a lot more knowledge.

That's not to say it was always easy. The qualities I admired in Monica — her strength, her conviction — sometimes caused me unease. Some of her island habits didn't jibe with mine. Some of her potions for common ailments were "folk" remedies I was unfamiliar with. Of course, in the New Age 1990s, I learned that many of them were not only effective but were beginning to be accepted by even some mainstream doctors — hot garlic and cayenne-pepper tea really does relieve the discomfort of cold symptoms! At the time, that home-concocted medicine scared me more than some totally chemical potion from the pharmacy.

But Monica was a natural where child rearing and healing were concerned. We had a three-foot-long section on the bookshelves of childcare how-to and reference books. Monica had her experience and her instinct.

Monica was -- and still is -- an essential part of our family unit. I don't know how the family would have functioned without her. We were blessed, right from the beginning. Once we had Monica living with us and helping with the more difficult aspects of taking care of our baby, I could really enjoy Charlotte. We were symbiotic in a way that mothers and their children have been for all time.

I have photos of Charlotte napping on my stomach as I napped. All of the maternal instincts I once feared I lacked were now kicking in. I instantly welled up with love and warmth whenever I saw her. She was soft and warm and beautiful. I loved walking around with her in her Snuggly — that harness that straps a baby to your stomach and that is essential to urban living and very primal, kangaroo like, in a wonderful way.

I also loved walking next to Tom as he carried her in the Snuggly. We were the closest we'd ever been then. He'd been home for three months, helping take care of Charlotte, and that was a great, bonding experience for all of us.

Still, even with all that Monica showed us, we knew so little about having a child. We joined a parenting class held by our pediatrician in the West Village. Career moms and dads just like us would show up after work to listen to Dr. Tsao talk about what it would be like to be a parent, from a medical angle. I remember arriving there, still buzzing from goings-on at work — deadlines, plans for a show, hiring, designing — and having to switch my focus to less tangible issues.

It was interesting to be hearing tips from a doctor about what to look out for as far as illnesses and milestones. She told us when our daughter should crawl, when she should walk. I was grateful to have that.

But none of it really registered then. It was academic, just a bunch of facts at that point. Like taking notes in health class in junior high. Charlotte was so young, most of what we were learning wasn't relevant yet.

A few months later, though, when Charlotte didn't crawl on time, it would all come into sharp focus. Suddenly, we would be aware of all sorts of milestones. And everything would change dramatically.

© 2006 by Dana Buchman and Charlotte Farber. Reprinted with permission.