Feel However You Feel About Your Postpartum Body

After I had my second baby, I distinctly remember staring in the mirror when I was about five months postpartum and feeling unsettled and discouraged. Most of my pants still didn’t fit right. I was losing so much hair (not aware of postpartum hair loss? It’s a thing). My stomach was soft, my thighs unfamiliarly large, my hips wider than before. My back often felt sore from so much sitting and nursing or bottle feeding. I didn’t feel strong or capable like I had pre-pregnancy.

There are many mental and physical adjustments to reckon with after having a baby. One of my areas of specialty as a therapist is perinatal mental health. I see how complicated and nuanced navigating the relationship to the postpartum body can be, not just in myself, but in my clients. 

We seem to get it from all angles. Lose the baby weight! Embrace your new body! Buy this cream to reduce stretch marks! Love your tiger stripes! We might intellectually know we’re worthy exactly as we are but genuinely believing it is a different story. As much as most of us would like to feel confident and accepting of our bodies, I think it’s important to recognize that societal messages to never feel good enough are way more internalized for most women. They are often louder in our minds than voices encouraging unconditional radical self-love and acceptance. 

So I want to add one small voice telling postpartum women that it’s okay to be discouraged and ambivalent and caught in between. Aiming to practice body-neutrality—not assigning too much value to our bodies, positive or negative—may be far more inviting and realistic.

As a woman in America, most of my internal world has been set against a secret backdrop, an ever-present dedication to guiding my daily decisions towards the holy aim of losing weight and perfecting my appearance, but never quite arriving there—like a shallow (pun intended) stream in which I am always wading.

Believe me, I’d love to step out of it, and I’ve made great strides in relating to my body and habits in healthier ways (thank you, intuitive eating principles, health at every size campaigns, also naturally giving less f**ks as I get older), but it is a constant stream of mental chatter with which I am all too familiar. 

We’re all aware of the pressure and expectation to “bounce back,” get your “body back,” ”slim down” post-baby. It’s been coursing through the media for decades. We can’t escape the reveals of celebrity moms who look unchanged two months out from delivery. More recently the message gets reinforced through social media. I would feel a pit of shame every time I’d see a thread in a mom group on Facebook where someone polls members about their postpartum weight loss and dozens of people chime in that they’re “back to pre-pregnancy weight!” or even lower. The social comparison game is endless. 

So fear not, the messages—that women should never feel good enough about themselves and should go to extreme lengths to change themselves at any given stage in their lives—are alive and well (and sadly, propagated mostly by other women). 

I’ve also noticed they're being met with an upswell of truly inspiring and well-intentioned body-positive messages, that can unfortunately, at times feel like toxic positivity. These posts and articles encourage self-love, acceptance, and gratitude for how strong and incredible our postpartum bodies are and all that they have done to create life and bring us our beautiful babies. (Some examples: here, here, here, and here.) 

Here’s where I bristle. While deeply important on a broader scale, and certainly not something that should stop, I worry that this positivity and pressure to love our postpartum bodies can create a different kind of unhelpful psychological pressure that’s important to acknowledge. They can add one more unattainable guilt-inducing mental task for mothers to feel like we're falling short in achieving.

These types of messages also cling to the narrative that we are to look and feel a certain way about ourselves in relation to the standard. We’re either hating ourselves because we don’t measure up or loving ourselves in spite of societal ideals. 

And here’s where I want to say: It's okay to have complicated and contradictory feelings about our postpartum bodies--to not be awash in gratitude all the time.

Just as I don’t have to love a glove or jacket that is too baggy or too tight or falling apart but still managing to do the job--still covering me up or keeping me warm, doing the bare minimum of what it was designed to do--I also don’t have to love or appreciate my body at every second. When clothing doesn’t fit, when something doesn’t work quite right, it is frustrating. When our bodies feel alien to us, it is uncomfortable, even if they’ve done an unquestionably miraculous thing.

To be clear: I am all for self-acceptance, self-compassion, and body positivity. I could not be more supportive of eschewing diet culture and loving yourself at every size, shape, stage, etc. I work compassionately and ardently with my clients to get them there when it’s appropriate to our treatment goals. To me though, part of that involves meeting people where they are--offering tools and guiding them towards insights, but not forcing a mindset that isn’t accessible at the time.

The act of sharing honest images on social media of postpartum bodies, as well as expressions of acceptance and gratitude, is necessary--on an individual, political, and societal level. I don’t want these images and messages to stop. I want more and more and more of them. I want to be bowled over by a flood of them. I want that shallow stream of self-criticism and unrealistic expectations to be diluted with realistic depictions of the postpartum experience and with messages of self-love until I’m totally swept up and surrounded by them--until I am completely inundated and immersed and I genuinely believe them about myself too. I want our children to get those messages without ever being aware that things were any other way, without knowing that we were all conditioned to doubt our worth so consistently.

But until then, I think it’s okay to struggle and feel like your body is foreign. Because it is! It’s been through a whole bloody (literally) lot of changes and continues to change. 

When your body is tasked with perpetually feeding and holding another human, when you find you can’t do things you used to love doing with your body, when your singular corporeal earthly home does not feel like home, it is okay to not be enthused. It is not necessarily a repudiation of body positivity and all it espouses. It is not a full-throttle embrace of a desire to be thin, smooth, etc. 

So if we're somewhere on the road from shaking off internalized self-loathing to unapologetic body-positivity, landing in body-neutrality should be a celebrated respite.

Rather than meet our postpartum bodies with derision or forced self-love (which might just turn into guilt), maybe we can practice an attitude of curiosity and acceptance, not necessarily for our bodies, but for whatever feelings we have about our ever-changing and changed bodies.