I have a confession: I was a fat kid. Nearly nine pounds at birth, baby three-chins, tall and “solid” all through school…I was neither an athlete nor a prom queen. When I went to college, my “freshman fifteen” came fast and easy. Try as I may, I could not shed the weight that had plagued me the first two decades of my life…until I moved across country and became a nanny. Living with an ultra-thin foodaphobe gave me a jump start to eat healthier, exercise more, and shun the junk food. In ten months, I shaved off roughly 40 pounds and was finally (mostly) comfortable in my skin.
I maintained my weight and healthy body-image over the next few years- through dating and marriage, my early-twenties were a time of confidence and security. Shortly before becoming pregnant with my first child, I confessed to my mom that I was terrified of becoming pregnant for fear of becoming heavy again. She assured me that I wouldn’t care so much once I had my children. That the feeling of empowerment from nurturing life would drown any petty concerns over the size of my hips or the lack of muscle tone.
She was wrong….
I gained about twice the weight I should have with my first son, despite an overall healthy diet and spending my days as a gymnastics instructor. When he was born, the “melting away” of the pounds while breastfeeding proved a fallacy. Eleven months later, I became pregnant again, still carrying 25 pounds of “unlost” baby weight. Fortunately, this time, I gained only 21 pounds and quickly shed 35 before becoming pregnant a third time. I repeated the pattern of 20 pounds gained, and easily lost again. My fourth pregnancy was marked by 30 pounds of weight gained and all but five or six pounds lost again by six months postpartum. If you bother to do the math, that gives me a net gain of four kids and 10-15 pounds in six years.
While gaining weight does not in any way excite me, it is not what keeps me up at night. What makes me shudder every time I take a hard look in the mirror is the transformation of my body into a loose, lumpy, saggy, stretchy, and sometimes swollen mom-body. And, to be honest, while I look at each of my babies and marvel at the ways they grew within me, were delivered by me, and then were fed from me for at least a year, I still really miss my old self. I miss v-neck, fitted tops that don’t make me fear the mid-life meeting of the belly and the boobs. I have always appreciated my curves, but would shed not one tear if those curves still fit into some of my old jeans. And what would really help my ‘girly cred’ would be if just a few of those cute little strappy heels did not make my feet look like giant, squishy bricks shoved into darling torture devices. Some days, I look at images of my old self and tear up…
But I try to take a broader view of the situation and realize that, while pregnancy and motherhood have certainly ushered in a new era in which I will be competing in exactly no beauty contests, I have gained so much more than I have lost. I now know the incomparable sense of life growing and stirring inside of me. I know the sense of majesty and power that the moment of birth holds. I know the humor of witnessing my body, which I once tried so hard to be master of, become a strange metamorphic entity of its own. And I am, truly, proud that I have traded in tight pants for t-shirts. It is a sign of the life that I lead; I am a mother and a playmate, a caregiver and a friend of toddlers.
I have not given up hope of achieving “hot mom” status. I do my best to get exercise and eat as healthy as I can. I have even found some unexpected “enhancements” to my pre-mom bod. My previous 34Bs have blossomed just a bit and my nails have grown past my nail bed for the first time in 30 years. And while I am pretty certain my ‘abs of steel’ are so far gone they are a thing of myth, I maintain a positive outlook. I have the distinct honor of being a mom. So what if I have to carry around saddle bags to prove it!
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To learn more about the emotional side of pregnancy and your changing body, listen to PregTASTIC, Episode 225.