When Your Body Doesn’t Feel Like Your Own

It’s the eyes on you, the hopeful eyes - sometimes an ill timed question “are you sure you’re not?”, then the eyes, even when they’re squinting with joy, and/or the comments of “when?”, “how many?”, “are you sure only one?” and “didn’t you have your baby?”, or the well meaning “give yourself time”. It’s the watchful eye and the two cent comments. It’s the cup runneth over of suggestions, tricks and tips and old wives tales mixed with “new age medicine” that’s also “been around for ages!” It’s everyone seeing what you’re trying to become, or not become, what you’re growing into, what you’re not fitting into or what you’re trying to reclaim. 

It’s your body. Your “divine image” that everyone gets a say in, but how are you to even hear how you feel through all the chirps of the peanut gallery? 

I remember the first time someone told me I had “child bearing hips” it was an older family member, well meaning - whatever that means but it shot to my core. What? I was fifteen. My body and its image was claimed by others far before that, as it is for most - gender aside. We’re all in constant judgment and under that social microscope. But the idea that my body was already being seen as something “sturdy enough” to birth a child… while I was a child. Whoa. Why? 

I hate to ever say “never under as much” and reference anything, because I don’t know all the journeys other lives take. But for me, and so many of those I support in the full spectrum of birth work - your body is never under as much scrutiny as when you’re working through infertility, during pregnancy, during loss, during birth and postpartum and early parenthood and later parenthood! You’re fair game. It seems you’re up for everyone to examine, to judge, to speak their opinions and their politics and their experiences - your body image is up for grabs. It’s the waitress in the diner in my twenties as I was leaving breakfast “you’re having a baby?”, 

“huh? Oh, no, just breakfast”

“no you’re having a baby!”. 

Sure, bye. 

I wasn’t. 

I never went back to that diner. 

So what happens when you’re able to process their comments, their stares and place those healthy boundaries - only create space for what you want and what you need. What then? Well, then you’re left with yourself. 

I remember the next time I felt the pull of the eye at my image - it was myself. I was twenty weeks pregnant and changing by the day it felt. My body was morphing into something I didn’t know. But I also did know - something I’d seen on my elders and I feared it. It was escaping me and becoming less me and more something else I wouldn’t be able to back track. I remember this mix of toxic wellness I exuded

“I don’t even care about the stretch marks, they’re helping me create a human!” 

mixed with a panic and failure I felt inside. 

It didn’t stop there. Postpartum left me lost in my image. My body truly, not my own. My autonomy, gone. My body, crumbling under exhaustion. So much of it was so unpredictable and uncontrollable and holding on by a thread. My body was working on overdrive to heal, and feed and “bounce back”. And it met most of those goals, not all of them. My image was unfamiliar and unwelcomed. 

Postpartum depression attacked me in those first few months and my body felt like an ever present reminder of the change that had taken over my life, that I felt completely pulled under by. And no amount of tender reminder of what my body had undergone to be at this place could rescue me from that image of my old self. I couldn’t see my new body, my new image - that of a mother, of someone who carried and birthed and fed and held my child. I could only see what my body was “supposed” to be doing, and it was failing me. I found my way out, to stand in front of myself and see that image with love and acceptance and with the eye of growth it deserves…but it took time and it’s still an evolution.

The space that fertility, pregnancy and postpartum lives in is a space littered with body image expectations, input and negativity. It also doesn’t escape toxic positivity which can feel fraudulent and dismissive at times. We are at a much better place than we were in the past in regards to the expectations we lay out for how your body should react to all these stages of transformation - but we’re not quite there yet. And no one ever knows quite what to say, because there is no “one size fits all”, just as our image isn’t “one size fits all”. Which is why it’s important to remember, we are ever evolving and so is our image.