postpartum and positive body image

Will you stay with me a second while I share something slightly vulnerable?

I’m hearing them again: the lies that come around every January with the annual resolutions: time to shed those extra pounds.

I’m so familiar with the voice in my head: the one that shames me — the one that belittles me when I look in the mirror and critiques my every new droop, sag, and lump.

These thoughts have been following me since I was a little girl, begging to be loved. When I think back to how much of my life has been dedicated to wishing I was living it in another body (a more ideal one), it saddens me … because I remember being not much older than Aimee is now, when I started thinking them. The thoughts don’t stop once you become a mom — Once your body has expanded and deflated and labored to create a person.

I tell myself that it’s okay, that it doesn’t bother me, with age, and with children, but the lies don’t go away. Not really. All the girl power anthems and juice cleanses in the world don’t mask those quiet moments when you hear the lies again and nod in agreement because they’re familiar, and so often the best lies are tied into some truth that you yourself have agreed to. How can someone combat 30 years of careful and meticulous conditioning — that tells us your body does not measure up?

Your body, with its miraculous and beautiful construction, marvelously functioning, working, breathing, beating, for you.

So we starve it, curse it, scold it, loathe it, want to change it, thinking that it will make everything better, but does it?

This is a belabored subject so I won’t tire you with the false pretense that the desire to be thin and pretty is going away overnight, but I will say that being kinder to yourself and giving yourself and your body permission to be imperfect is definitely in your realm of possibility, today.