Parenting: GAINING
A BABY, LOSING A BODY
THE
OTHER PAIN OF CHILDBIRTH:
Reflections on the Trauma of Postpartum Body Changes
by Joyce Maynard
Originally
published in Glamour Magazine
Still in my midriff top and
spandex pants, I stopped in at my neighborhood coffee shop the other day
on my way home from my workout at the gym. But instead of losing myself
in the morning paper as I often do while I linger over my cup of coffee,
I found myself studying the woman, probably ten or fifteen years younger
than I, a couple of tables over.
She was nursing an
unhappy-looking almost-newborn infant and trying, without much luck, to
have a cup of tea and read the paper herself. Her hair was falling out
of its bun and her skirt -- though this was just nine thirty -- was rumpled.
You could tell she was a slim woman generally, but the baggy shirt she
wore didn't really conceal her still-enlarged mid-section or her obvious
sense of discomfort about her physical self. There were circles under
her eyes, and something else that went deeper: the look of a woman who
feels depressed and overwhelmed. Hardly the beatific image of a new mother
most of us are presented with, in books and magazine articles on the subject.
But the fact is, I recognized that look. I remember when I looked that
way myself. In fact, I remember nursing my own baby at some coffee shop,
and studying a woman a couple tables over, wearing workout clothes, with
a flat stomach and enough time and freedom to still put on earrings and
eyeliner. And I remember wondering, as I held my infant in my arms, if
I would ever again be such a woman myself.
It wasn't a question of happiness or misery, exactly. If you'd asked me then, was I happy?, I would have told you yes, of course I was. I had gained a daughter more precious to me than I could ever have imagined, and I couldn't imagine life without her. But somehow, along the way, it felt as though I'd lost my self. The most obvious and traumatic manifestation of that fact being the total disappearance of my body as I'd known it. I call it the other pain of childbirth. And for me, as for a lot of women I've known in the years since, it was that experience, far more than the pain of giving birth, that marked the greatest trauma associated with having a baby, and the one least talked about.
Like many women, I embarked on my first pregnancy with very little understanding of what lay in store for me over the nine months ahead, let alone the years after. At twenty-three, and just newly married, I hardly knew anyone who'd had a baby other than my friends' mothers. My head was full of romantic pictures: cute outfits I'd buy, songs I'd sing, the color I'd paint my baby's room. When I pictured myself pregnant, the images that filled my head were of a woman like the models in the maternity ads -- with great cheekbones, slim hips, elegant legs, perky bosom -- who simply looked as if she'd stuck a basketball under her dress. From behind, you wouldn't even have known she was pregnant.
So, even as my obstetrician and midwife were recommending a thirty to thirty-five pound weight gain from my usual 120 pounds, I figured I could still hold onto my basically lanky look, and nobody told me differently. All of which left me totally unprepared for the realities of pregnancy and the postpartum period that followed.
As a teenager, I'd suffered from anorexia. By the time I married, my weight was normal again, but close to a decade of intense scrutiny to my diet and hyper-vigilance about every pound gained or lost had left their mark. I was one of those women who registered every minute variation in the fit of her jeans. If I had a harder-than-average time zipping them up, my day might be ruined. A gain of three pounds sent me into a two-day-long fast, or a week of nothing but grapefruit and carrot sticks.
And so in a funny way, for me pregancy signalled not simply the larger and more obvious joy of having a child, but also, more immediately, a glorious vacation from my self-imposed obligation to be skinny. After so much deprivation and anxiety surrounding food, suddenly I could eat. In fact, I had to eat, and to eat well. So I did.
In the end, the nearly fifty pounds I gained during that first pregnancy were distributed in plenty of other places besides my middle. My face filled out. My ankles swelled. My hips widened. Even my hands, I joked nervously, looked pregnant. But even those things didn't deeply worry me, in my close-to-euphoric anticipation of the baby. Once she was born, I figured, I'd "take it off," the way the models did in the magazine articles. "It took me six weeks before I could zip up my jeans again!" one of them was quoted as saying, in a feature I cut out on post-partum tummy-trimming exercises. But my baby was due in February, after all. So I figured, no problem, I'd be back in shape by bathing suit season.
Mostly what I focussed on during my pregancy was the event of childbirth, of course. And so I practiced breathing techniques and prepared myself for what I understood would be levels of pain and physical challenge I'd never experienced before -- and directed all my energies towards that moment when the first contractions would begin. Our daughter was born at home, on our bed, with a midwife in attendance -- and though I would never describe her birth as easy, the pain was like a huge wave I had managed to surf all the way in to shore, with all the accompanying sense of pride and accomplishment at having been able to meet the challenge. That first moment I held Audrey in my arms I remember thinking I'd never need or want anything more in life than what I had right then. The books had told me this would be the happiest moment in my life, and it was.
The hard part -- barely mentioned in those books -- came the morning after my daughter's birth. That's when I stepped on the scale and discovered that of the 50 pounds I'd gained during my pregnancy, I still had 40 left to lose. My stomach looked like a deflated beach ball. My breasts, engorged with milk, made me resemble a cartoon character. Nine months worth of coconut oil applications hadn't prevented stretch marks. And then there was the shattering experience, several weeks after Audrey's birth, when a distant acquaintance stopped me in the supermarket, on one of the rare occasions I was out on my own, and asked "When's the baby due?"
I went home, flung myself on the bed, and cried for an hour, vowing to begin a vigorous exercise program right away. But where, in my old, footloose days, before motherhood, I would simply have lived on grapefruit and carrot sticks until I got my weight back to where I wanted it, what I found after having a baby was that none of my old methods of keeping in shape fit my new life as a mother. I couldn't run over to the gym and take an aerobics class at five o'clock. I had to feed my daughter. I couldn't jog -- not with my alarmingly unwieldy nursing breasts. And when I put on my leotard in the privacy of my home to do a few sit-ups, just the sight of my bulky-looking middle was sufficiently depressing that all I felt like doing was comforting myself with a brownie. No doubt it didn't help, either, that I was married to a man with a washboard stomach, whose own weight hadn't varied more than a pound or two since he was sixteen. Every evening, as I nursed or bathed our daughter, I'd watch him take off on his jog, or head out to play softball -- feeling, myself, like a player who's been benched. And when bathing suit season came, I kept my baggy t-shirt on.
After our daughter's birth, my midwife had told me that nursing would help my uterus contract back into its old shape, while (dieter's dream) the milk my body produced would use up vast quantitites of calories. What she didn't add was that so long as I was nursing, my appetite would also be insatiable. I was hungry all the time from nursing all the time. And I craved food for another reason too: as source of comfort and nourishment, during a period in my life when it seemed I was giving out all day long, without taking in enough for me.
Home all day with an infant, isolated from friends and work, I had gone within a space of months from active career woman to one whose sole function in life, it sometimes felt, was feeding, changing and holding my baby. I lived in sweat pants and loose tops. I felt overweight, unattractive, and totally unsexual. For nine months, I had literally housed my child inside my body: my blood had coursed through her veins; the food I ate passed through the placenta into her. After birth she was a separate being, of course, but still dependent on me in so many ways. When she screamed with gas pains, my stomach clenched tight. Just the sound of her voice, crying, would set the milk gushing from my breasts. And so, like a lot of new mothers, I had a hard time distinguishing precisely where I ended and she began.
Before Audrey was born, I had been the young bride, the ingenue. Now I was the mother. The most adored female at our house was Audrey, not me. And even though I stood at the front of the line of those doing the adoring, still I think there was a bittersweet quality to having entered so young and so unprepared into the flanks of "the older generation." I was no longer the fairest in the land. My darling daughter was. And as much as I loved her and rejoiced in her birth, it sometimes felt as if a small death had occurred too: My own.
Eventually (though with considerably more time than it took the famous fashion model to get back into her jeans), I lost the weight I'd gained in my pregnancy. And though I had two more babies after that one, I never again gained the amount of weight or suffered the level of distress and depression I experienced that first time. Mostly, I think, because I embarked on those pregnancies with so much more knowledge and understanding of what happens to a woman's body -- mine in particular -- when she's having a baby, and after delivery. I was more careful about fat and sodium during my pregnancy, more careful to exercise. And more realistic about what I'd feel and look like after the birth too. I started swimming regularly. I took up ice skating. And when I couldn't get to a gym, I'd dance to old rock and roll records with my children in our living room.
But while it's true that I got back to something close to my pre-pregnancy weight within four to six months of my sons' births, it wasn't until years later that I was truly able to retrieve possession of my own body -- getting back not simply to a number on the scale, but acquiring the sense of being comfortable with my body. My hips were fuller. My waistline was thicker. Those things weren't going to change. What had to change were my attitudes.
Women in our culture have plenty of issues surrounding their bodies, of course, even when we haven't experienced the challenge of pregnancy and delivery. In my case -- viewing my experience with the distance over a decade gives -- I can see now that I wasn't really in possession of a clear sense of my body, before I had children. And without a clear and healthy body image, going into pregnancy, it was nearly impossible to arrive at one, after the trauma of such swift and dramatic transformation.
The pregnancy part was fine. Pregnant women aren't supposed to be skinny. The problem was, that while we have been given images of pregnancy that allow for big bellies, nobody carries around with her an image of a recently postpartum woman. Isabella Rossellini in David Lynch's Blue Velvet was a rare example: A beautiful woman, no question. But one who (I would have known, even if I hadn't read it somewhere) had clearly had a baby recently. She just had that look. But far more typically, if we're to believe the images on television, in movies, magazines and ads, at least, a woman can be either pregnant or slim. Period. We know what a big belly looks like. What they don't show us is a deflated one, two weeks after delivery. The baby has left. The extra fat and stretched-out skin has not.
For myself, having bought into a view of female beauty inextricably linked with skinniness (as so many of us do), I couldn't see my full hips and nursing breasts, after delivery, as womanly -- only fat. And I couldn't give myself the degree of self-acceptance and comfort that would have allowed me to slowly, comfortably find my way to retrieving my former firmness. All I could do was cover up my stomach in maternity tops and starve myself, or feel guilty when I lost my resolve and didn't starve myself. I should have gone out and bought myself a beautiful outfit in a bigger size after my baby was born -- given myself permission to look a little different for a while. Instead, I lavished all indulgence on my child (who would have been just as happy in hand-me-downs) and neglected my own needs even more in the process.
The books I read, and the birthing classes I attended focused on the mother, during pregnancy. But after the moment of birth, concern shifted from mother to baby. Nobody ever said to me that pregnancy and giving birth is nothing less than a monumental challenge for a woman -- not just physically, but emotionally too.
Giving birth is a journey that leaves you in a different place from where you were when you started out. A richer place, in many ways. But not a trip that comes with a return ticket. You can have a good body after giving birth. Maybe even a better body than the one you had before, eventually. But it probably won't be the same body. And you'll deal better with that fact of life if you know it, going into the experience, than you will if you you set yourself the goal of fitting into your old jeans before your baby's graduated from newborn sleeper suits.
Demi Moore -- posing naked and gorgeous on the cover of Vanity Fair, nine months into her pregnancy, may make it look as if being pregnant is nothing more complicated than carrying around a basketball, and even more terrific, naked and gorgeous on the cover of Vanity Fair again, twelve months later, looking as if having a baby is nothing more complicated than dropping that basketball. But the fact is, Demi Moore was working out with a personal trainer three hours a day to look that way -- no doubt aided, as well, by makeup artists, hairdressers, a nanny and housekeeper. Those photographs, beautiful as they may be, are hardly realistic or helpful images for us to carry around as images of a pregnant or post-partum woman.
One of the things that's hardest for a postpartum woman to understand, the first time around, is the necessity for patience. I wanted my old body back, and I wanted it now. If I had understood, at the outset, that there was simply no way I'd look trim and firm, two weeks after giving birth (but also, no reason why I couldn't look that way, twelve months later) I wouldn't have been so quick to set myself up with unrealistic expectations that amounted to a prescription for failure. If you know, going into the experience of having a child, that it's going to take your body a while to recover from the demands of childbearing, you'll probably have an easier time letting go of your old pre-pregnancy standards for your body. Having lived three times now through the transformation of my body -- but also its eventual return to trimness -- I think I would no longer panic as I did, the first time, at the sight of my enlarged breasts and extra pounds, and the sense of myself as little more than a baby-carrier and milk machine.
At the age of twenty-three, I understood how to take care of an infant. What I didn't understand was the importance of giving myself the same sort of loving care I showered on my daughter. Ideally, of course, a husband or a parent or good friends and neighbors step in after a baby's born, in ways that make it possible for a new mother to have time away from her child. But when they don't recognize the need for a new mother to have those things, it's important for the new mother, herself, to make her needs known and make sure they're met. I used to complain that my husband went off to play sports, while I stayed home with our baby. But the fact is, I also allowed an unhealthy pattern to continue by pretending that my situation was acceptable to me, when it wasn't.
I was lonely and isolated, during the period when I was caring for my first child, as I was, increasingly, when I was caring for the two who followed. But part of the blame for that occurrence rests squarely on my shoulders too: because I never expressed as clearly as I should how deeply unfair and unacceptable our situation truly felt, and what a toll it was taking. I'm not married to my children's father any more, and that's part of the reason why.
Nobody every came along to tap me on the shoulder and give me permission to get a Y membership or sign up for a dance class. I had to recognize for myself that I needed and deserved those things. Not coincidentally, that was also when I found sufficient self-esteem and motivation to get into the kind of shape I hadn't been in for years. Not the starved, dieted-down self of my pre-childbearing days. But a strong, mature woman, who eats three meals a day, has a womanly shape, a few stretch marks, and good biceps and calves. Also one who gives herself permission not to be perfect.
The journey I've made in the nearly sixteen years since giving birth to my first child has been about a lot more than getting out of shape, and back into it again. The way my body looked over the course of those years, and the way it has changed, were not so much the source of my difficulties as they were the manifestation of them: testimony, in the flesh as it were, to the trap that I and so many others around me fell into, in which a mother sets aside her own self for the service of her children. Pregnancy is only the most powerful metaphor for the way women give over their bodies to children -- not just once, but again and again over the years of nurturing them. Some of it healthy and constructive. Some of it not.
I will always remember the afternoon of the first party my husband and I brought Audrey to, a few weeks after her birth. I must have spent an hour bathing and dressing her for the event -- changing her dress a couple of times until I was sure I'd found the most adorable outfit, and then fixing her surprisingly full head of hair in little pigtails, with pink plastic barrettes. Only when I was partway out the door, with diaper bag and baby in my arms, did my husband point out to me that I was still wearing nothing but my underwear. I -- the woman who, a year before, would have spent at least an hour preparing for a party, myself. Now my vanity was all projected onto my child. The boundaries between us were so blurred I had actually thought that because she was ready for the party, I must be ready too.
It took me far too long to recognize that it's possible to have a child without giving up some essential piece of one's own self. Not only possible, but infinitely preferable, in fact. Only part of the problem has to do with our bodies, of course. But regaining a sense of ownership and control over one's own body after pregnancy is a crucial place to begin, I think. Because every woman who gives up her body to her child (and everything that goes with it -- her sense of her own sexuality, for instance) is apt to leave that child saddled with an overwhelming sense of guilt and obligation, for her sacrifice.
So these days, I take care of my children, but never to the exclusion of myself. I don't do without food, so there'll be more for them. I don't forego nice clothes, so they can have ensembles from The Gap. I may sit on the bench watching their ball games. But I also play in a few games myself. Some mornings I'm home to fix them oatmeal and wave as they ride off on the school bus. But other mornings, they have to pour their own cereal. I've already left for the gym.
I give my heart to my children, alright -- that part hasn't changed. But as for the rest of me: I wish I'd known, when I was twenty-four, and weeping over the bathroom scale, what I know now about that one. You don't have to give your body to your child. You only lend it.
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