Body image: the ultimate cliche of new motherhood

In the ultimate new mother cliche fulfilment, I’ve put on a fair bit of weight since having my daughter. The weeks after birth, my weight fell really quickly because I couldn’t stomach any food. The hormonal hit made the thought of eating as unappealing as it was during my first trimester. We didn’t know when my appetite would come back, so Lewis diligently made me smoothies with as much nutrients packed in as possible, and they’re all I really consumed for a couple of weeks. The few times I attempted to eat a meal, I had to sit in silence and focus comically hard on getting a few bites down. I knew how important it was to my milk production, but goddamn was it a disgusting struggle. So once I could stomach food again, I let myself eat anything and everything. At least I was eating again! At least I was getting some calories in to turn into milk! Did it matter that it wasn’t nutrient dense? Probably. That it was packaged? I mean, yes. But that was the least of my worries at that point. Those first two weeks were not kind to me.

The problem is that the “I can eat anything cause I’m having a hard time” attitude has persevered for five months now. And I’m not having a hard time! I’m having a great time! The excuse is gone, but the solution remains!

I don’t know how to dress myself anymore and I look like a slob 100% of the time. I have zero sex drive and even less of a desire to be seen as or play the role of a sexual being. I feel stuck between two ages: young all-black-everything and a grown up who should have grown into some other sense of style by now. Feminity feels particularly wrong. Dresses, skirts, frills, flowering, flowing - no. I want to be hard and tough but also comfy and clean, approachable and maternal. My hair all wrong, my face has aged, my body is bloated.

But at the same time, I feel the most like myself that I have in my life. I’m really good at being Esther’s Mum. It comes naturally to me, I don’t feel like a changed person, just an enhanced version of my core self. I’ve never had much of a sense of purpose in life, and now I do. That’s not to say that I’m “just a Mum” or that’s all I am, but it’s a level of definition I’ve not had before. My outside mismatching my inside so fundamentally is jarring, but it’s not like I have the time or energy to care either.

So here’s my maternity leave business #8392 that will never get off the ground: a postpartum workshop centred around finding your sense of style and self within your new identity. They’d do colour analysis, have sample clothes in all shapes and sizes to show you what does and doens’t suit your new shape, and tell you where to buy it all. It’d all be good stuff, though- good quality, eco conscious, natural materials. Polyester isn’t about to make anyone feel glamorous in their confused vulnerable state. Actually, better than just showing you what you could buy, they’d sell it to you. No need to go anywhere else. It’s like if Tan France worked with new Mums in a modern department store. One stop shop, no thinking, give a bit of guidance about your preferences (like not ultra-feminine for me), and they just sort you the fuck out. I’d pay for that. I’d pay a lot for that. Until then, I will continue to wear exclusively pants that stretch and a small sample of my maternity clothes.

I have always had a pretty “fuck it” attitude to looking after myself. Self care is not a natural trait of mine and so far, 31 years in, it’s not a learned one either. To summarise: I hate exercise, I love sugar. I give up easily, I love a little treat. My favourite pastime is solo cafe visits to eat a toastie and a sweet with a book and chai and people watching. Days where I get to be home feel like a special occasion worthy of weekend-style indulgence (the fact that I am home every day now doesn’t seem to have impacted this attitude). A cup of tea without a bickie just feels like something is missing. I’m the family dessert queen, but the real secret is that I only make dessert for others so I can eat it for myself. In fact, I only eat dinner so that I can have dessert afterwards. A dog walk is too much to ask, let alone a work out. I embody the deadly sins: gluttony and sloth. And I love it! I like being this way! It’s comfortable, calm and delicious. But it is not, unfortunately, healthy. And once every couple of years, it catches up on me. It doesn’t help that I have a hormonal imbalance that is impacted severely by excess sugar, so living my preferred lifestyle inevitably puts me in a predicatble spiral: I eat for pleasure, which kicks off my health issues, making me feel weaker and lazier, so I eat for comfort, and on and on we go until, eventually, sometimes, I’m able to snap out of it for a year or so and sort myself out. My real problem is that I’m a person of extremes. I can either have it all or nothing at all. I can not stop at one, or once. My most successful health kick was full extinction style keto. No carbs, no sugar, no alcohol, barely even any fruit, just low carb veggies and meat and cheese. It was a success in that I felt great and slimmed down, but I could not break it. Not once, not ever. Once it hit Christmas and I let the rules relax, I didn’t stop. And here I am now, two years later, back to square one. But that’s not the sort of relationship with food I want to model to my child. That sort of restriction - good foods and bad foods and foods that you can have, can’t have, must never have - that’s a sure fire way to set up an innocent child for a shitty relationship with herself and the dinner table. It’s also not sustainable to add that sort of pressure to my already chocka-block mental load. I don’t have the capacity to be stressing about Esther’s entire livelihood and wellbeing, as well as my own restrictive food intake. Blergh, god no.

That is, of course, another complicating factor: raising a daughter. I want her self worth to be completely disconnected from the way she looks. I still remember being small and my Mum making passing comments about how she’d put on weight. “I used to be a size 10! Even after I had you guys! But look at me now!”. She meant no ill harm in expressing this around me, and she never commented on my own body or shape or size, but regardless, I made a small innocently childlike mental note. Size 10 = good. Anything else = bad. I have been many sizes since that time, my weight goes up and down and around and around like seasons, but to this day, I still feel best when I’m around a size 10. Whether that is a coincidence or not is impossible to say, you can’t divorce yourself from your childhood. Regardless, this is not a belief (subconscious or otherwise) that I want my daughter burdened with. It is my responsibility to model good self esteem to her, and not just fake it. Kids are intuitive, they know when you’re lying to them, and I suspect, to yourself. I have to believe it if I want her to believe it. So I better work out how to believe it before she tunes in.

So much of parenting is just reparenting yourself. Finding the parts of yourself that you picked up along the way and don’t want to pass down. The rejected, accidental, often unintentional heirlooms of life. Lately, I am faced with the jewelled crown of female self esteem and identity, with all its shining diamonds and bent metal. It’s something we all take on and off, on and off, as we grow and change and move closer and further from ourselves. Now, I am faced with the choice of what to do next: put it back in the cupboard, hide it away and pretend it doesn’t matter, or show my daughter how fucking good our we look in crowns.