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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 2 of 2 Eventually (though with considerably more time than it took the famous fashion model to get back into her jeans), I lost the weight I'd gained in my pregnancy. And though I had two more babies after that one, I never again gained the amount of weight or suffered the level of distress and depression I experienced that first time. Mostly, I think, because I embarked on those pregnancies with so much more knowledge and understanding of what happens to a woman's body--mine in particular--when she's having a baby, and after delivery. I was more careful about fat and sodium during my pregnancy, more careful to exercise. And more realistic about what I'd feel and look like after the birth too. I started swimming regularly. I took up ice skating . And when I couldn't get to a gym, I'd dance to old rock and roll records with my children in our living room. |
| But while it's true that I got back to something close to my pre-pregnancy weight within four to six months of my sons' births, it wasn't until years later that I was truly able to retrieve possession of my own body--getting back not simply to a number on the scale, but acquiring the sense of being comfortable with my body. My hips were fuller. My waistline was thicker. Those things weren't going to change. What had to change were my attitudes. |
| Women in our culture have plenty of issues surrounding their bodies, of course, even when we haven't experienced the challenge of pregnancy and delivery. In my case--viewing my experience with the distance over a decade gives--I can see now that I wasn't really in possession of a clear sense of my body, before I had children. And without a clear and healthy body image, going into pregnancy, it was nearly impossible to arrive at one, after the trauma of such swift and dramatic transformation.
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| The pregnancy part was fine. Pregnant women aren't supposed to be skinny. The problem was, that while we have been given images of pregnancy that allow for big bellies, nobody carries around with her an image of a recently postpartum woman. Isabella Rossellini in David Lynch's Blue Velvet was a rare example: A beautiful woman, no question. But one who (I would have known, even if I hadn't read it somewhere) had clearly had a baby recently. She just had that look. But far more typically, if we're to believe the images on television, in movies, magazines and ads, at least, a woman can be either pregnant or slim. Period. We know what a big belly looks like. What they don't show us is a deflated one, two weeks after delivery. The baby has left. The extra fat and stretched-out skin has not.
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| For myself, having bought into a view of female beauty inextricably linked with skinny-ness (as so many of us do), I couldn't see my full hips and nursing breasts, after delivery, as womanly --only fat. And I couldn't give myself the degree of self-acceptance and comfort that would have allowed me to slowly, comfortably find my way to retrieving my former firmness. All I could do was cover up my stomach in maternity tops and starve myself, or feel guilty when I lost my resolve and didn't starve myself. I should have gone out and bought myself a beautiful outfit in a bigger size after my baby was born--given myself permission to look a little different for a while. Instead, I lavished all indulgence on my child (who would have been just as happy in hand-me-downs) and neglected my own needs even more in the process.
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| The books I read, and the birthing classes I attended focused on the mother, during pregnancy. But after the moment of birth, concern shifted from mother to baby. Nobody ever said to me that pregnancy and giving birth is nothing less than a monumental challenge for a woman--not just physically, but emotionally too.
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| Giving birth is a journey that leaves you in a different place from where you were when you started out. A richer place, in many ways. But not a trip that comes with a return ticket. You can have a good body after giving birth. Maybe even a better body than the one you had before, eventually. But it probably won't be the same body. And you'll deal better with that fact of life if you know it, going into the experience, than you will if you you set yourself the goal of fitting into your old jeans before your baby's graduated from newborn sleeper suits. |
| Demi Moore--posing naked and gorgeous on the cover of Vanity Fair, nine months into her pregnancy, may make it look as if being pregnant is nothing more complicated than carrying around a basketball, and even more terrific, naked and gorgeous on the cover of Vanity Fair again, twelve months later, looking as if having a baby is nothing more complicated than dropping that basketball. But the fact is, Demi Moore was working out with a personal trainer three hours a day to look that way--no doubt aided, as well, by makeup artists, hairdressers, a nanny and housekeeper. Those photographs, beautiful as they may be, are hardly realistic or helpful images for us to carry around as images of a pregnant or post-partum woman. |
| One of the things that's hardest for a postpartum woman to understand, the first time around, is the necessity for patience. I wanted my old body back, and I wanted it now. If I had understood, at the outset, that there was simply no way I'd look trim and firm, two weeks after giving birth (but also, no reason why I couldn't look that way, twelve months later) I wouldn't have been so quick to set myself up with unrealistic expectations that amounted to a prescription for failure. If you know, going into the experience of having a child, that it's going to take your body a while to recover from the demands of childbearing, you'll probably have an easier time letting go of your old pre-pregnancy standards for your body. Having lived three times now through the transformation of my body--but also its eventual return to trimness--I think I would no longer panic as I did, the first time, at the sight of my enlarged breasts and extra pounds, and the sense that of myself as little more than a baby-carrier and milk machine. |
| At the age of twenty three, I understood how to take care of an infant. What I didn't understand was the importance of giving myself the same sort of loving care I showered on my daughter. Ideally, of course, a husband or a parent or good friends and neighbors step in after a baby's born, in ways that make it possible for a new mother to have time away from her child. But when they don't recognize the need for a new mother to have those things, it's important for the new mother, herself, to make her needs known and make sure they're met. I used to complain that my husband went off to play sports, while I stayed home with our baby. But the fact is, I also allowed an unhealthy pattern to continue by pretending that my situation was acceptable to me, when it wasn't. |
| I was lonely and isolated, during the period when I was caring for my first child, as I was, increasingly, when I was caring for the two who followed. But part of the blame for that occurrence rests squarely on my shoulders too: because I never expressed as clearly as I should how deeply unfair and unacceptable our situation truly felt, and what a toll it was taking. I'm not married to my children's father any more, and that's part of the reason why.
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| Nobody every came along to tap me on the shoulder and give me permission to get a Y membership or sign up for a dance class. I had to recognize for myself that I needed and deserved those things. Not coincidentally, that was also when I found sufficient self-esteem and motivation to get into the kind of shape I hadn't been in for years. Not the starved, dieted-down self of my pre-childbearing days. But a strong, mature woman, who eats three meals a day, has a womanly shape, a few stretch marks, and good biceps and calves. Also one who gives herself permission not to be perfect.
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| The journey I've made in the nearly sixteen years since giving birth to my first child has been about a lot more than getting out of shape, and back into it again. The way my body looked over the course of those years, and the way it has changed, were not so much the source of my difficulties as they were the manifestation of them: testimony, in the flesh as it were, to the trap that I and so many others around me fell into, in which a mother sets aside her own self for the service of her children. Pregnancy is only the most powerful metaphor for the way women give over their bodies to children--not just once, but again and again over the years of nurturing them. Some of it healthy and constructive. Some of it not. |
| I will always remember the afternoon of the first party my husband and I brought Audrey to, a few weeks after her birth. I must have spent an hour bathing and dressing her for the event--changing her dress a couple of times until I was sure I'd found the most adorable outfit, and then fixing her surprisingly full head of hair in little pigtails, with pink plastic barrettes. Only when I was partway out the door, with diaper bag and baby in my arms, did my husband point out to me that I was still wearing nothing but my underwear. I--the woman who, a year before, would have spent at least an hour preparing for a party, myself. Now my vanity was all projected onto my child. The boundaries between us were so blurred I had actually thought that because she was ready for the party, I must be ready too.
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| So these days, I take care of my children, but never to the exclusion of myself. I don't do without food, so there'll be more for them. I don't forego nice clothes, so they can have ensembles from The Gap. I may sit on the bench watching their ball games. But I also play in a few games myself. Some mornings I'm home to fix them oatmeal and wave as they ride off on the school bus. But other mornings, they have to pour their own cereal. I've already left for the gym.
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| I give my heart to my children, all right--that part hasn't changed. But as for the rest of me: I wish I'd known, when I was 24, and weeping over the bathroom scale, what I know now about that one. You don't have to give your body to your child. You only lend it. Back to Part 1 of 2
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- This
article is used with permission
of the author. Please visit her website at joycemaynard.com.
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