mardi 20 juin 2017
What I Regret Most About My Postpartum Body
The author, carefully posing, and her family.
There were a lot of surprise physical consequences from having a baby that I was not prepared for. I still have carpal tunnel, I get tennis elbow from deadlifting my large child a gazillion times a day, and despite getting a C-section I still am cursed with a weaker than desired bladder. While those are minor annoyances that I can mostly ignore or get over, how my body looks postpartum is not something I was prepared for.
It wasn't until I noticed that there are only a handful of photos of me with my son that I realized how big of an impact my new figure was having on my life. From an outsider's perspective, I don't look that different. After perusing some old Facebook photos recently, I'd guess that I weigh about five to 10 pounds more than I did at my wedding five years ago. That's really not a lot when you consider that the nonmother version of me had a lot of spare time on her hands to train for races and leisurely walk up San Francisco's notorious hills. Looking back on the pictures from long ago, I'm stunned to think I ever had a "mom pooch." If I had only known.
Most of my premom clothes still fit; they just fit differently. My hips turned out in preparation for a baby and they never really went back to normal. While I am still not blessed with a booty, I now am the not-so-proud owner of an actual mom pooch, which is accentuated by my scar and stretch marks. I would love to be the kind of person who has a supreme DGAF attitude when it comes to my body and proudly rock a bikini at the beach just waiting for the haters to come at me.
But I'm not tough, and that has never been me. When looking for photos of me in a bathing suit for this post, the only ones that I found were from college and even there you can see my arm purposefully draped across my negligible belly as I try to shield myself from the camera. I think part of the reason I'm avoiding photos now is because I've always been this way: someone who is overly concerned that she's not thin enough, and pregnancy certainly hasn't helped that.
A thinner, more-willing-to-be-photographed version of the author.
It's easier now for me to be the one who takes the pictures rather than be the subject. Prebaby me thought nothing of handing over the camera to have someone take a couple silly shots. I did so because I knew that, thanks to the wonders of digital technology, I could delete any photos I found offensive or ugly and I could make sure they were from the waist up.
Taking pictures of my son has changed my willingness to step in front of the camera. First of all, getting a squirmy little ragamuffin to sit still long enough to take one photo is a miracle, but getting him to focus for multiple for the sake of finding my good angles is next to impossible. A 2-year-old does not care about my artistic vision, and seeing how my arms look while holding him doesn't encourage me to try again.
For Father's Day last year I went through and collected my favorite pictures of my husband and our son and printed them in a photo book. I had so many pictures to chose from that I needed to edit and could pick out only the best ones. This year for Mother's Day, my husband said he wanted to do something similar but couldn't when he realized that there just weren't enough pictures of me. Unknowingly, my hangups about my body had erased me from my son's first couple of years. Any photos that I could find were taken at a distance, hidden by Winter coats, or selfies. I've taken great pains to document my son's life while at the same time removing photographic evidence that I had anything more than a head and neck.
One of my genius friends, when faced with the same dilemma after her firstborn, decided to, instead of removing herself from the photos entirely, just carefully prop herself behind her husband or baby. I remember giving her grief for it, but now I am so jealous that at the very least she's got pictures with her infant.
I'm trying to be better by asking my husband and those around me to take pictures. I know my relationship with my body isn't going magically get better overnight or with one photo, but I refuse to let the next few years of my son's life disappear and not have a single photo to show for it. I wish I could go back in time and yank my phone out of my hand and tell my former self to be in the freaking picture already.
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