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- Gaining a Baby, Losing a Body
- By Joyce Maynard
- THE OTHER PAIN OF CHILDBIRTH:
- Reflections on the Trauma of Postpartum Body Changes
- (originally published in Glamour Magazine)
| Part 1 of 2 Still in my midriff top and spandex pants, I stopped in at my neighborhood coffee shop the other day on my way home from my workout at the gym. But instead of losing myself in the morning paper as I often do while I linger over my cup of coffee, I found myself studying the woman, probably ten or fifteen years younger than I, a couple of tables over. |
 She was nursing an unhappy-looking almost-newborn infant and trying, without much luck, to have a cup of tea and read the paper herself. Her hair was falling out of its bun and her skirt--though this was just nine thirty --was rumpled. You could tell she was a slim woman generally, but the baggy shirt she wore didn't really conceal her still-enlarged mid-section or her obvious sense of discomfort about her physical self. There were circles under her eyes, and something else that went deeper: the look of a woman who feels depressed and overwhelmed. Hardly the beautific image of a new mother most of us are presented with, in books and magazine articles on the subject. |
| But the fact is, I recognized that look. I remember when I looked that way myself. In fact, I remember nursing my own baby at some coffee shop, and studying a woman a couple tables over, wearing workout clothes, with a flat stomach and enough time and freedom to still put on earrings and eyeliner. And I remember wondering, as I held my infant in my arms, if I would ever again be such a woman myself.
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| It wasn't a question of happiness or misery, exactly. If you'd asked me then , was I happy?, I would have told you yes, of course I was. I had gained a daughter more precious to me than I could ever have imagined, and I couldn't imagine life without her. But somehow, along the way, it felt as though I'd lost my self. The most obvious and traumatic manifestation of that fact being the total disappearance of my body as I'd known it. I call it the other pain of childbirth. And for me, as for a lot of women I've known in the years since, it was that experience, far more than the pain of giving birth, that marked the greatest trauma associated with having a baby, and the one least talked about.
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| Like many women, I embarked on my first pregnancy with very little understanding of what lay in store for me over the nine months ahead, let alone the years after. At 23, and just newly married, I hardly knew anyone who'd had a baby other than my friends' mothers. My head was full of romantic pictures: cute outfits I'd buy, songs I'd sing, the color I'd paint my baby's room. When I pictured myself pregnant, the images that filled my head were of a woman like the models in the maternity ads-- with great cheekbones, slim hips, elegant legs, perky bosom-- who simply looked as if she'd stuck a basketball under her dress. From behind, you wouldn't even have known she was pregnant.
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| So, even as my obstetrician and midwife were recommending a thirty to thirty five pound weight gain from my usual 120 pounds, I figured I could still hold onto my basically lanky look, and nobody told me differently. All of which left me totally unprepared for the realities of pregnancy and the postpartum period that followed.
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| As a teenager, I'd suffered from anorexia. By the time I married, my weight was normal again, but close to a decade of intense scrutiny to my diet and hyper-vigilance about every pound gained or lost had left their mark. I was one of those women who registered every minute variation in the fit of her jeans. If I had a harder-than-average time zipping them up, my day might be ruined. A gain of three pounds sent me into a two-day-long fast, or a week of nothing but grapefruit and carrot sticks. |
| And so in a funny way, for me pregnancy signaled not simply the larger and more obvious joy of having a child, but also, more immediately, a glorious vacation from my self-imposed obligation to be skinny. After so much deprivation and anxiety surrounding food, suddenly I could eat. In fact, I had to eat, and to eat well. So I did. |
| In the end, the nearly fifty pounds I gained during that first pregnancy were distributed in plenty of other places besides my middle. My face filled out. My ankles swelled. My hips widened. Even my hands, I joked nervously, looked pregnant. But even those things didn't deeply worry me, in my close -to- euphoric anticipation of the baby. Once she was born, I figured, I'd "take it off", the way the models did in the magazine articles. "It took me six weeks before I could zip up my jeans again!" one of them was quoted as saying, in a feature I cut out on post-partum tummy-trimming exercises. But my baby was due in February, after all. So I figured, no problem, I'd be back in shape by bathing suit season. |
| Mostly what I focused on during my pregnancy was the event of childbirth, of course. And so I practiced breathing techniques and prepared myself for what I understood would be levels of pain and physical challenge I'd never experienced before--and directed all my energies towards that moment when the first contractions would begin. Our daughter was born at home, on our bed, with a midwife in attendance--and though I would never describe her birth as easy, the pain was like a huge wave I had managed to surf all the way in to shore, with all the accompanying sense of pride and accomplishment at having been able to meet the challenge. That first moment I held Audrey in my arms I remember thinking I'd never need or want anything more in life than what I had right then. The books had told me this would be the happiest moment in my life, and it was. |
| The hard part--barely mentioned in those books-- came the morning after my daughter's birth. That's when I stepped on the scale and discovered that of the 50 pounds I'd gained during my pregnancy, I still had 40 left to lose. My stomach looked like a deflated beach ball. My breasts, engorged with milk, made me resemble a cartoon character. Nine months worth of coconut oil applications hadn't prevented stretch marks. And then there was the shattering experience, several weeks after Audrey's birth, when a distant acquaintance stopped me in the supermarket, on one of the rare occasions I was out on my own, and asked "When's the baby due?"
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| I went home, flung myself on the bed, and cried for an hour, vowing to begin a vigorous exercise program right away. But where, in my old, footloose days, before motherhood, I would simply have lived on grapefruit and carrot sticks until I got my weight back to where I wanted it, what I found after having a baby was that none of my old methods of keeping in shape fit my new life as a mother. I couldn't run over to the gym and take an aerobics class at five o'clock. I had to feed my daughter. I couldn't jog--not with my alarmingly unwieldy nursing breasts. And when I put on my leotard in the privacy of my home to do a few sit-ups, just the sight of my bulky-looking middle was sufficiently depressing that all I felt like doing was comforting myself with a brownie. No doubt it didn't help, either, that I was married to a man with a washboard stomach, whose own weight hadn't varied more than a pound or two since he was sixteen. Every evening, as I nursed or bathed our daughter, I'd watch him take off on his jog, or head out to play softball--feeling, myself, like a player who's been benched. And when bathing suit season came, I kept my baggy t-shirt on.
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| After our daughter's birth, my midwife had told me that nursing would help my uterus contract back into its old shape, while (dieter's dream) the milk my body produced would use up vast quantitites of calories. What she didn't add was that so long as I was nursing, my appetite would also be insatiable. I was hungry all the time from nursing all the time. And I craved food for another reason too: as source of comfort and nourishment, during a period in my life when it seemed I was giving out all day long, without taking in enough for me. |
| Home all day with an infant, isolated from friends and work, I had gone within a space of months from active career woman to one whose sole function in life, it sometimes felt, was feeding, changing and holding my baby. I lived in sweat pants and loose tops. I felt overweight, unattractive, and totally unsexual. For nine months, I had literally housed my child inside my body: my blood had coursed through her veins; the food I ate passed through the placenta into her. After birth she was a separate being, of course, but still dependent on me in so many ways. When she screamed with gas pains, my stomach clenched tight. Just the sound of her voice, crying, would set the milk gushing from my breasts. And so, like a lot of new mothers, I had a hard time distinguishing precisely where I ended and she began.
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| Before Audrey was born, I had been the young bride, the ingenue. Now I was the mother. The most adored female at our house was Audrey, not me. And even though I stood at the front of the line of those doing the adoring, still I think there was a bittersweet quality to having entered so young and so unprepared into the flanks of "the older generation". I was no longer the fairest in the land. My darling daughter was. And as much as I loved her and rejoiced in her birth , it sometimes felt as if a small death had occurred too: My own. Read Part 2
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article is used with permission
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