The Adventures of the Postpartum Mommy Monster and Her Wavering Body Image

Eight months after the birth of my daughter, I waffle between confidence and confusion in the mirror.

When I was pregnant, I felt like everyone that I encountered shined a spotlight on my stomach; a curtain backdrop would fall behind me reading “Welcome to the Body Show” while I performed a little twirly here, a little twirly there, for my earnest audience in observation of my fertility.

Now in my postpartum body? The spotlight is just a flashlight and the flashlight batteries are dead and someone put my body on Zillow without my permission. My posting reads, “Fixer Upper.”

A few days before I went into spontaneous labor, a man at a restaurant, a stranger, made a “joke” about my pregnant body. He scoffed as I scooted out of my booth and shuffled by his table to use the restroom. Chuckling with gargle like he was choking on his own saliva, he murmured, “Heh heh, hope your water doesn’t break on me, heh heh.” He was dining with two other women. They said nothing, but they smiled at him and continued to pick at their food. They didn’t know I’d heard or seen them.

I returned to my seat. Later in the evening, I gave his table a belly bump on my way out, vibrating his water glass, liquid sloshing onto his flailing hands and mushy burrito. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I couldn’t make it around your table, I’m just so clumsy. My water might break on you at any second.”

Unexpectedly, his face turned tomato-red. He apologized profusely, in retreat, tail between his legs. One of the women he was dining with grabbed my arm, to which I yanked away, horrified, and still she said, “Honey, you’re beautiful. He was just making a joke,” reframing the insolent actions of her man friend into the assumed frailty of my own self-esteem while laying her own hands on me. As if I was reacting to defend my vanity.

There are so many infuriating layers to this stupid encounter.

Of course, there was no “joke.” There was merely an unsolicited comment from a self-identified funny guy who’s really just an ass. Woman 2 kept quiet upon my confrontation, avoidant.

Woman 1 proceeding to touch me was equally jarring. Caress, caress — ah yes, pregnant woman very soft. Calm now pregnant woman, there there pregnant woman. It’s all fine pregnant woman, just go with the flow, the flow, the flow.

I am both the circus and the petting zoo.

I never interpreted this man’s comment to be an attack on my perceived beauty. He was cosplaying as a comedian and personifying my pregnant body as The Jester. And I was nine months pregnant, carrying 80 pounds of excess weight pressing upon my fragile joints and suffocating organs, preparing for a revolution of self and absolutely fed up with being everyone’s clown at the Body Show.

I turned to Woman 1, “Please don’t touch me. And it’s not about whether or not I feel beautiful.” I then turned back to the man, “You shouldn’t comment on a pregnant woman’s body. You don’t even know who I am. You are a stranger. Pregnant women in public like me are tired being the butt of bad jokes with no punch lines. Please don’t do that again.” I thanked him for apologizing. He hung his head.

I waddled away, stewing like a teapot. Thinking about the difference between my own body image and the way other people observe my body. Feeling beautiful and unbothered by a flappy mouth in a restaurant, but feeling irked by the cognizance of how many eyes were looking at me all the time, poking at the belly holding my daughter before I’d had the chance to meet her myself.

I’ve been lucky enough in this life to waft through it with a hefty armor of self-confidence. These days, I grapple with more insecurity than usual. Mostly, I contend with the fact that while all that I am is unseen, all that you will see is external. It’s a jarring paradox of being a soul in a body.

In pregnancy, I became so acutely aware that everyone really was looking at me all the time. At the post office. At the grocery store. At the doctor’s office. People staring like they’d never seen a pregnant woman before. People staring with adoration. People staring with nostalgia. People staring and making snap judgments, assumptions. People staring to define their own feelings. It was disorienting and uncomfortable.

I loved how I felt in my body while I was pregnant. Physically, I despised every painful and debilitating symptom, but my body confidence was high. I felt like a goddess. I felt powerful in my shape, charged by my womb, my daughter growing perfectly inside me like the miracle she is that I will never be able to explain.

But that womb is empty now. It has been empty for eight months. The evidence of my daughter still lingers on my skin, and now I’m neither a joke nor a miracle. The spotlight has been taken away. I’m not a spectacle, for laughs or for praise.

I’m a body in need of repair.

I trace my stretch marks like constellations. I squeeze the sagging skin on my thighs, my stomach. I touch my heart, my head, my arms, my hair.

Yes, body. Hello, body. Are you ready to get fixed body? Are you ready to bounce back and buy this cream and eat this magic sauce and swallow this rainbow pill and act like you never made a whole human?

As a pregnant woman, I am a spectacle to be celebrated.

As a postpartum woman, I am a broken thing commanded to embark on an impossible quest: look like you were never pregnant.

My daughter will only ever know the me in The After. How could I ever pretend like I am now something she has never known?

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Will this Avocado Oatmeal Chicken Noodle Soup moisturizer make me look like I’ve never given birth?

The Wellness Industrial Complex does not care about healing my postpartum body. It is a trillion (yes, with a T) dollar industry that wants me to fear it.

Everything about my current existence apparently needs to be fixed. My pointy nose, the “before” image in every rhinoplasty advertisement. My tiny lips, the “before” image in every lip filler side-by-side. My smile lines, doomed to Hell for carrying 32 years worth of hearty laughter.

The stretch marks. The hair. The skin. The nails.

The face. The arms. The stomach. The thighs.

Her body was a home. Her home has been sold. It needs a remodel. Now! Get rid of this evidence that she’s alive. You can just be you again if you just put this orange creamsicle dreamsicle on your drooping mommy eyelids and pay us $70 for 1 ounce of the virgin plant sauce we put in a really cool orange bottle.

As confident and self-assured in my skin as I’ve generally been, I sometimes look in the mirror and think to myself, “LOL wow, I’m ugly.” And thus, I am the unwilling target for the orange creamsicle dreamsicle that I did succumb to wasting $70 on last month and now my face looks as wrinkly and as spotty as ever.

Positive body image is not a thing that can be bottled and sold. It is not a thing that can be kept in a locket, accessible to the heart any time its beloved owner is wearing it around her neck. It is an ever-evolving concept of self and identity that must be revisited and revised over and over again to possess and hold.

Postpartum is the first time I’ve ever felt inconsistency with my body image. It’s not the weight — it’s the shape of it all. It’s the foreign person looking back at me in the mirror.

It’s the face I see that used to run around in pigtails kicking a soccer ball that now holds a baby girl who may one day wear her hair in pigtails kicking a soccer ball.

I used to tell myself that I would never spend my limited heartbeats worrying about whether or not some hypothetical (or perhaps real) person has an opinion about my weird toes or the red bumps around my chin that I was promised were only a “teenager thing.” But sometimes I can’t control the voice that screeches in my eardrums when I look at my reflection that mocks, “Stop! You are now entering the Crone Zone.”

I don’t really feel ugly. I don’t even really know what ugly means when the concept of beauty is entirely subjective. What I do know is that for most of my life, prior to becoming pregnant, I had some semblance of control over the way my body moved through the world. I have mostly felt really good about it until movement stopped feeling good approximately eight months ago.

My body is the Encyclopedia of Peculiar Maladies.

Prone to odd ailments, I have been forced to overcome vanity in favor of my health several times — to prioritize the way my body works rather than the way my body looks. I’m privileged enough to be able-bodied and without chronic illness, but I’ve experienced my fair share of bodily affliction.

I was born with Torticollis, resolved after my first year of life. I’ve had a few benign but painful ovarian cysts, some of them ruptured. I’ve endured chronic muscle tears in my legs from years of competitive soccer. Panic attacks plagued my youth. I miscarried the first time I got pregnant. I’ve had almost every part of my body biopsied — cervix, breasts, concerning skin patches on all limbs, torso, chest. Luckily, I’ve been spared from malignant cells, but now I call the doctor for anything out of the ordinary and gaslight myself when I think something else is breaking down.

When I was 17, a cardiologist found a hole in my heart. Diagnosed with Atrial Septal Defect, a congenital condition, I underwent heart surgery immediately and spent six weeks of my junior year of high school with a hideous heart monitor belt I had to alarm every time I felt an arrhythmia, and I spent three weeks after my surgery watching blood thinners turn my tiniest bruises into abstract art. I still see a cardiologist regularly to monitor my heart’s electrical signals.

In pregnancy, I was familiar with some form of suffering. Discomfort? Pain? I don’t like her, but I know her. I have always turned to movement to help my body in whatever way I could. Yoga. Running. Sports. Movement has always been a large part of my identity because of the way it has always made me feel — clearheaded, strong, capable.

Movement has brought forth physical health in a form that I can control, and in turn has given me confidence in how I can float through the world.

Since I gave birth to my daughter, my desire to move has vanished. It is a lost part of my identity that I’m not sure is part of The Before or is simply something that will dance back to me. But what has gone with it is my orientation of my physical being — I am eight months postpartum and still feeling upside down and inside out in my own skin.

I posted that Note on February 5, and I’m still feeling like Mommy the Monster.

I know that I am recovering from a transformational shift and raising a baby at the same time. My husband still thinks I’m really cute. My hair didn’t fall out. I stopped peeing my pants.

But in solidarity with the millions of moms who I know are feeling the same way, I just feel like a blob. A mommy blob. A blibbity blobbity goobly glob. I want to blob in my blobdom and wallow about my blobbiness.

Yes, this is temporary. Yes, I just created a life. Yes, this will pass.

No, I am not bouncing back to a place that does not exist and I cannot bounce anywhere anyway — you will roll me, FORWARD. Toward the chocolate cake. PLEASE.

No, I am not who I used to be. No, I am not The Before Me. I am the Mom Me and I am everything that leaves evidence of this new identity I would cover myself in ugly scars for to become over and over again.

I am trying to heal. I am trying to learn who I am in this new vessel. I am trying to feel pretty because I’m human and it’s hard to feel pretty when you’re a human milk truck. Healing and fixing are very different acts — to heal is to restore to health. To fix is to assume something is broken. I am not broken. I am postpartum.

In creation and birth there is metamorphosis and combustion and revolution, but I am not a body that needs to be replaced with the version I abandoned when my daughter was brought into this world.

Postpartum moms, we are saggy, we are baggy, but we are powerful. And one day we will laugh about this phase, telling our then teenage daughters that they are capable, they are powerful, and they are beautiful just the way they are.

We must never let the orange creamsicle dreamsicle people tell us otherwise. (Okay, but it does SMELL good).

💌

Xo,

Violet Carol

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