big pants

stop lecturing me about my post-partum body

Lately, I’ve been thinking about full-length mirrors. I haven’t lived with one for over a decade, since I moved out of a flat where one was handed down. Three homes later and I still never entirely know if my shoes match my top. But we’re renovating the bedroom at the moment and it’s getting to the fiddly bits, and I wonder if we should finally get a big mirror in.

Having lived without one means I’m not hugely aware of what I look like, head-to-toe, with no clothes on. I’m not fearful of what I might see, I’ve just never got around to it. But it increasingly feels like a small political protest not to have one.

I thought I had weathered the slings and arrows of millennial body image. I spent my girlhood sailing the choppy waters of Size Zero and Kelly Brooke (who has always seemed lovely, for what it’s worth) and a childhood spent watching fellow child Britney Spears skip down a high school hallway with a bare waist the size of a Walkers multipack. I have always considered myself fortunate to have arrived on the dry land of enough body confidence to eat as I like, exercise primarily for endorphins and wear what I want.

But then I had a baby. And then another one. And it all began again.

Thanks to growing up in an era of the gossip weeklies and Heat magazine’s Circle of Shame (for the blissfully ignorant: pap shots of celebrities were zoomed in on to find “embarrassing” details such as cellulite or, more often, a bit of shadow under a thigh, whereupon a red circle was drawn and a loud shouty caption applied) I was well-aware of the quiet societal merit of “springing back” after harbouring another human inside my body, pushing it out of my body and then sustaining it with, you’ve guessed it, my body. Much as there was a quiet societal merit of my life returning to what it was pre-baby, I would gain the same invisible points if my body returned to its pre-child self, too. I both knew this was ridiculous and silently believed it at the same time.

But times had changed: birthing people now shouldn’t be expected to return to their pre-birth state, that was cruel patriarchal nonsense! Instead, we should relish our post-natal bodies, for they had done wonderful, miraculous things. Our bodies, which had changed in ways we couldn’t even imagine, were framed as beautiful.

For me, this is where the rub really set in.

My post-natal body, like a lot of post-natal bodies, did not look like it ever had done before.