postpartum changes

Loving Me, Postpartum Jiggles et al

August 5, 2014

I wrote about loving your body after a baby after my last baby. I had to re-read it since I’ve had this one. Postpartum is this awkward transitional time when your skin tries to remember where it was before the Great Stretching, and your breasts try to gauge how much milk to make for this baby, and your belly jiggles and your face has lost its color, and you’re just plain in the middle of it all. As I write this, our little baby is almost three months old. I’m still so postpartum. I haven’t lost much weight since I had him. My body feels that heavy jiggle jiggle never-wear-a-bathing-suit-again feeling. My hair has clumped out on the side of my head, leaving the look of a bad side side bang job. I still occasionally slip into a hot bath when everyone is done with a day of needing to be held, loved, sternly glared at, fed, diapered, read to, praised, censured, hair patted out of their faces. The hot water like a deep breath for my skin, my motherly parts all tuckered out. My girlfriend Blythe just wrote this beautiful post on her blog, The Fike Life, about loving the nursing mom who had to dash after her toddler, displaying her soft tumtum to the world inadvertently. And how it gave her permission to not be perfect, not worry about being beautifully put together. We need that permission. “But one day I watched a veteran mother of many pop…

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My Body/Their Body: Loving Your Post-Baby Body

November 30, 2012

 My sister and I with her little girl when she was 7-ish months and me pregnant with SweetPea. Giving birth radically changes your body in so many ways, on the surface of your skin, and inside on a cellular level. And to top it all off, you have a new human being as the biggest change of all. My body bounced back more quickly after SuperBoy, and still isn’t quite normal 8 months after SweetPea. (Of course, the caramels and real cream in our mashed potatoes doesn’t help.) This is my little guide to loving your post-baby body. 1) Remember that you share(d) your body with another person–with that comes many changes. Your child grew inside you. What you ate affected them. The sounds around you when they were in utero affected them. Your stress levels affected them. It wasn’t just your body during pregnancy. It encompassed both of you. That alone is mind blowing. And worthy of just saying wow. And then after all this growing inside, you delivered them into this world. So, keep all this in mind as you run through the litany of physical changes to your body because of your child inside. It’s a real privilege and a gift to be able to conceive and carry to term a baby. Not to be taken for granted. Love your body. Love it for its lumps and bumps. Its pouches and pooches. Its veins and stripes. Its balloons and leaks. It’s the only body you get for this…

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