Living with that Mom Belly

A woman’s weight. You’d think we’d be over this obsession, this thought that it is more than her worth, that it makes up her worth, and yet…

There’s nothing like putting your body through an absolute wringer. Getting pregnant, watching as your belly swells and all kinds of crazy shit happens to your body. People compliment you, tell you how beautiful you look, how you’re absolutely ‘glowing’. They cherish your body, worship it for bringing life into this world. And then, the birth comes and a month or two passes and it’s no longer beautiful. It’s no longer worshipped for bringing life into this world. It’s viewed at as disgusting, as lazy, as the thought that the ‘wife’ let herself go, that her husband must be just beside himself with disappointment that his partner’s body has not ‘snapped back’ yet.

There is so much that happens to your body when you’re pregnant, it’s wild. From organs rearranging themselves to your uterus expanding, to your brain, basically, short-circuiting itself, it’s a wonder why anyone would call pregnancy, and the days after birth anything but extraordinary. The fact that my body makes actual food is insane. Bodies are like that. They’re mind-blowingly extraordinary and wonderful.

We need to start thinking of our bodies in those terms. Extraordinary. Wonderful. Think about what your body has done for you today. Think about everything it has done for you in the past, whether it’s getting pregnant and birthing a whole damn human, or you’re participating in a triathalon. Bodies. Are. Extraordinary.

Unfortunately, the mass media and social standards we have adhered to for decades thinks otherwise. Yes, there seems to be a pretty big shift in how bodies are viewed nowadays, as people become more comfortable in their skin, but we’re not there yet. We’re not in the place where we can sit and love and our bodies unconditionally, never worrying about stretch marks (which happen to everyone, whether or not you’ve gotten pregnant), never worrying about cellulite (anyone remember the early 2000s? As a teenager — a fucking teenager — I was using anti-cellulite cream on my thighs so as not to look dimply), never worrying about a soft belly and a belly button indent showing through a skirt, dress, or shirt.

We have fallen in love with women of all shapes and sizes, and yet, when it comes to our bodies after birth, we revert back to those stupid social standards we’ve obsessed over. We wonder why our body is so squishy, as our baby nestles happily in our arms, laying their soft little head on our soft big bodies. We look at our breasts and remember when they used to sit upright without any help at all, as our baby finds nourishment. We lament the stretch marks, coating ourselves in creams and butters and oils that tell us everything will be alright again, that our bodies will go back to exactly how they were before, even though they are nowhere near how they were before.

We don’t want to give our bodies time to heal, time to nourish our babies, time to nourish ourselves. We want to look how we did pre-pregnancy. We want to wear the clothes we used to fit, and want them to fit just as comfortable as before. We want our partners to lust after us like they did before, even if they are still lusting after us; we assume everything has changed. Because that guilt creeps in. That idea that we need to look a certain way. That this celebrity or that celebrity has the most perfect body you’ve ever seen, and she just gave birth three months ago, all the while forgetting that said celebrity has money to throw at every problem that arises, has help around the clock so they can work out until their bodies look how they think they should look, how media tells them to look, starting the vicious cycle all over again.

So where do we go from here? We stop hiding what our bodies look like. We start to love what our body has done for us, everything it can do. We stop attacking ourselves, attacking our bodies, just to look a certain way. We start realizing that a little bit of a mom belly isn’t the end of the world. When dad bods are trending, it’s time to take a step back and wonder if we’ve really just fallen off the map as people. Because if a dad can not have birthed a human being but still have a belly, still be a wonderful person, still love his children, and still be sexy to not only his partner, but to others? Then moms can, too.