Shannon
Keough
Your post-baby body image
M
y daughter was about a year old when I went to see Gramma’s Boyfriend, a band featuring local musician
Haley Bonar. I’d last seen her perform many months before, when both Haley and I were pregnant. I don’t know her personally, but the fact that we have daughters about the same age made me feel like we had some kind of cosmic bond. Then Haley came out on stage. This was the woman who’d been my pretendcomrade in pregnancy? She was thin as a rail! I contemplated my own still-fleshy body — the body I’d finally started feeling okay about again. I felt a wave of selfloathing, realizing how shallow I was being. Was this what I wanted to model for my daughter — an insecure, appearanceobsessed mother? “When women become new mothers, they are often very surprised at how long it takes for their bodies to feel and look ‘back to normal,’” said Sara Pearce, founder of Amma Parenting Center in Minneapolis. “Not feeling at home in a postpartum body can heighten a woman’s sense of being a stranger in a strange land. With all the changes in identity that motherhood brings, living in a postpartum body can add to the sense of losing oneself, especially for women who have struggled with a prior eating disorder or negative body image.” Clearly, my conflicted feelings about my appearance were normal. However, this knowledge didn’t make it any easier when
12 July 2014
I was unable to fit into any of my nonmaternity pants, or when I saw pictures of myself looking slumped and wilted while holding my infant daughter. The transition from pregnant to postpartum was harsher than I’d expected. I think this had a lot to do with my generally positive experience of pregnancy. I gained a normal amount of weight, had minimal side effects (no morning sickness, for example) and felt good about the way I felt and looked. Friends and strangers fawned over my pregnant self. It was a big nine-month ego boost. Then I had my baby, and everything changed. Suddenly, I was no longer the center of attention — my baby was. And that was probably a good thing, really, because I was supremely disappointed with what I’d become. I felt exhausted and lumpy. My skin was dull and my hair was
falling out. I’d gone from feeling smokin’ hot to feeling like a gnarled old shadow of femininity. Even worse, I felt guilty about the way I was feeling. Shouldn’t concerns for my baby take precedence over concerns for my eternally bloated midsection? I probably could’ve been easier on myself, though. The National Institute of Mental Health recently conducted a study examining body image during the postpartum period. According to the study, women’s body dissatisfaction tends to increase significantly in the nine months after delivery, peaking around six months postpartum. This was found to be associated with worse mental health (especially depression) and overeating or poor appetite, among other troubling things. So, it would seem that new mothers needn’t feel so guilty when they sadly slip into their worn-out yoga pants for the