The Sacredness of an Imperfect Pregnancy and Post Pregnancy Body

I hate that my body doesn't show pregnancy until I am in the third trimester AND is back to prepregnancy size in six weeks or less.  Yes. You read that right.  I hate what most magazines tell you that you should kill for.  However, I have good reason for it.

A pregnant body and, for that matter, a newly post pregnant body is a sacred space.  It is meant to be different, curvier, and fuller because your life is different, curvier, and fuller.  Desiring your prepregnancy body at such times might be an attempt to feel "normal" but the changes you see are the message to the world that "this" IS the NEW normal.  Why would your body not reflect the emotional and spiritual growth that is happening within?  The fetishism of youth and life before children is not only ridiculous but also pointless.  Your life before children transitions into something else post children; your body makes that transition, too.  That doesn't mean you won't be fit again or you won't look good again, but it does mean you may not look or feel the same and that's alright.

You have earned the right to look the way you do.  You are accomplishing a great thing.  You have grown or are growing another perfect human being.  You have kept an entire human being safe and nourished when no other could.  Your body is sacred.  It is a universe onto itself in which your baby will spend or has spent every second of his/her existence before birth and when the birth needed to happen, YOU did that whether by natural means or c-section. What could possibly be more beautiful than that? A size 6?  A size 2?  I don't think so!  Who the heck can/should care whether or not you look as traditionally, culturally "sexy" as you did before you created an entirely new life?  Consider this. . . Which is a healthier view of beautiful or normal? An eternal image of what you looked like in your teens and/or twenties or an ever evolving image of the rest of your sixty to eighty years on this planet?  Who really wants their lives to be exactly the way it was pre-children? Why would you want your body to be that way?  

Love yourself and your post baby body.  Forget about its size and its relationship to what others may construe as attractive.  Forget about getting back to "normal." Embrace the awesome abnormality and sacredness of your birthing years.  That is true beauty. (In the meantime, I will try to find the beauty of looking about the same on the outside while being transformed on the inside.)

Thanks for reading,

Shawna