If there is anything I’m not, it’s a centerfold model. But for a couple days postpartum, I could have been.
** Dad: maybe now is a good time for you to not read... **
Since bleeding and tearing and a sore booty aren’t torture enough, Mother Nature keeps mothers rotund well after baby escapes the uterus. As a mother herself, you’d think she’d have a little compassion. Perhaps it’s biological birth control.
Reproducing is an ugly, swollen sticky note, reminding you to think twice before doing it again. ...And I haven’t even mentioned the flatulence yet.
My experience was unsightly:
* My fingers and toes felt like jelly rolls.
* My shoes didn’t fit.
* My thighs resembled Redwood trees.
* I wore my wedding ring on my pinkie.
* I put pictures of my ankles on milk cartons in hopes someone would recognize them and send them home.
* Five days postpartum, the lady in the nursing bra section of JCPenny’s asked me when I was due. Ouch.
I tried not to let it bother me. After all, I had a kid in the NICU and a house without running water. I had bigger fish to fry and no intention of not eating them. Diets would come later.
And then later happened.
About a week after our sojourn home, my body thinned out everywhere except my engorged and now plastic-looking looking chesticles. The width of my waist was thinner than that of my forearm, but I needed a 34-D braziere.
My nurse friend, Kyle, (who is a girl, not a boy and likes to tell people she had a sex change) said bodies swell once inflated with IV fluids like I had when I received the labor-inducing drug, pitocin. Note: the cankles.
After a few days, the body expels all those fluids and defies its natural state, she said, rendering Playboy bunnies where new moms are supposed to be.
How sinister is that? I finally look like Malibu Barbie, but I’m handcuffed with a husband (although awesome, but think how many free drinks I’d get if I could play the field??), a small child and a doctor’s note forbidding hibbity dibbity.
Like all good things, my post-baby bod didn’t last. I’m back to normal Katie-weight, just different shapes and sizes, i.e., the bowl full of jelly where my abdominals used to be.
I’m satisfied in this. The treadmill and I were never Facebook friends anyway.
Some women get really down on themselves, mourning their old bodies and contorting their new ones with control-top undergarments, butter-less diets and self-esteem below sea level.
I feel bad for them. I can understand the frustration. It helps to have a husband/partner obtuse to such benign beauty, someone like mine, someone more focused on changing our baby’s diaper than me trying to show off in a tight-fitting tank. He only noticed the obscenities I called “ankles” because I asked him to rub them so much. And he did. From the floor. Because sitting in chairs hurt his back to much.
Oh, memories.
Anyways, I’m more willing to show off my bod post-baby than before. Not because I’m particularly proud of it, but because no less than 74 medical professionals looked at my goods and reached their hands where even tampons don’t go. (TMI? Good. Remember that next time you leave the Prophylactics at home.)
But what about you and what about the other women? Are you proud of your new body? Ashamed? What did you do to reclaim it? Or are you too busy with housework/real work/breastfeeding/holiday gift wrapping to notice? Any good, mushy husband/partner stories to share? Or even better, got any really bad ones? I promise to throw cyber stones at the real assholes...
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