Posted on Thursday, 22nd September 2011 by Jake Clutterbuck

by bubandteebs

Every time I rush into the grocery store without my kids I feel the overwhelming need to announce “It’s ok that I look like this! I’m a mother!” When my kids are with me, I have a free pass to look a little frazzled, but when I’m solo I want everyone to know the reason for the extra pudge around my middle and the halfhearted pony tail on my head. I’m not unkempt, I’m a mother.

Even before kids, I never was a fashonista, and I’ve always battled my annoyingly thin hair. So now it’s kind of nice to have an excuse. It’s the “extra pudge around my middle” part that has been the biggest adjustment to motherhood. I used to be skinny. I also used to be youthful, spontaneous, and freebut those things I am better off without. It’s that “skinny” word that has caused a lot of problems. I was effortlessly skinny. I was a McDonalds for lunch, pizza for dinner, bedtime snack kind of skinny and I never gave it much thought. Before I was a mother I hovered somewhere above 100 pounds, I never sucked in to fasten a pair of pants and shapewear was a gross, foreign word. And then? Then babies happened.

I have the clearest, crisp memory of the day my doctor peered over her glasses at me in my 20 week check-up during my first pregnancy. “Do you have any questions?” she asked, and I waved around at the red lightning bolt shapes on my thighs, “Yeah, are these things going to go away?” She had a quick and startling response. “No.” My whole body was frozen except for the tears swelling up in my eyes, threatening to spill over, when she explained that those “things” were stretch marks. And no, they don’t go away.

As a young, new mother at that moment I couldn’t imagine anything worse than stretch marks. I was young enough with our first baby, Ronnie, that I just assumed that everything would quickly go back to normal once I gave birth. Whatever had grown would shrink, and whatever had stretched would disappear. And about 6 months after Ronnie was born, that was more or less true. It took a little bit of squinting, but once I saw through the stretch marks and left over sags of skin, more or less, I looked the same as my pre-baby body. It was at least recognizable, and life went on.

But two years later when we had Thomas, everything changed. The baby weight hugged tight to my body months after he was born. Suddenly shapewear was no longer a foreign word, it was a necessity. When I waved to my kids a thick dollop of underarm fat waved too. And I began to wonder if my mom-pouch stomach was a permanent addition to my body. I just didn’t recognized my body any more, the combination of stretch marks, loose and limp skin, and extra weight turned my body into an alien that I didn’t know. The burden of accepting my new body seemed far heavier than the actual extra weight I was lugging around.

My husband was patient, but he couldn’t hold back his eye roll every time I poked or pinched a part of my body and scrutinized its bubbly buoyancy. He would jiggle his own stomach and remind me “we’re not perfect, babe.” But I didn’t want to give up on that slender, smooth, 100 pound dream. Every aspect of my life was willingly and completely devoted to my children, but my body was still mine.

The hardest part for me to accept was when I did finally slim down, everything was still wider. From my hips to my ribcage my frame had simply slid apart and widened, and it was not going back. Finally, my husband grew tired of my obsession with my body. He drove me to my favorite store. He sat in the waiting area of the dressing room, patiently, until I emerged with a pile of clothes bundled in my arm. He looked down at our oldest son and said “She’s smiling, let’s go.”

As I tried on clothes in that dressing room, I recognized and accepted that I was a size 6 and not a size 2. But actually, I looked really good in a size 6. Nothing was hanging over the tops of my pants, I wasn’t tucking in rolls while I tried to zip them up. I just looked good. But to get to that point I had to mourn. I had to mourn the loss of my pre-baby body, I had to go through the months of poking and prodding and begging my husband to say something good about the way I looked. And then I had to let it go. That evening as I neatly stacked my new clothes in the dresser and beamed at the “Size 6” stamped on everything, I gave the smoothness of my young body one last warm, wishful thought. And I let it drift away. I let it go.

So, I have stretch marks. I have size 6 pants. I have a little extra layer of thickness that at times is just a little bit jiggly. I have wider hips and wider ribs. And also? I have two amazing, laughing, growing, squealing boys, and I would choose those boys a million times over any skinny pre-baby body.

-Jess Rassette

Tagged as: Baby weight, Pre baby body, Stretch marks


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