21 April 2007

post-baby body

At 34, I have four children. I stopped triathlon training when pregnant with my last baby. I have always been fit, and always put on between 15 and 28kilos for each pregnancy. I never cared so much about weight, I believed that I was the incubator for my baby and just let my body do what it needed. I was in the hospital coffee shop with a girlfriend and my baby one day after my last caserarian delivery, we were approached by a mother and her two teenage girls, the mother congratulated my girlfriend on the birth of her baby and I was asked when mine was due....it set the tone for comments over the next eight weeks. I was in a chemists shop and the pharmacist asked me when my baby was due - I was holding a week old baby!! I could be pushing my brand new baby at the shops and strangers would ask me how hard is it to be pregnant so quickly again....It sucked, I stopped counting those comments after I reveied 14 unsolicited nasty remarks from strangers. Nobody wants to be large after the birth of a baby, if supermodels get six weeks to get back into shape, can't I , an ordinary working class woman, with a career, study, home and children take just a little longer???? It is not women who put pressure on themselves, it is all of the jerks and thier dreadful rude comments. A sleep deprived new mother does not need to be told anything other than "you look wonderful, your baby is beautiful" etc. If you don't have anything nice to say....P.S. My latest baby is almost four months old and I am still a size twelve, I feel unfit and unattractive, I have veins, stretch marks and sagging breasts, I don't have time to dye my grey hair or apply eye cream, I also have four beautiful children and a wonderful husband who loves all of me, for my real body and the life that it has given. I will lose the weight, in the june mid semester break I will have more time to exercise and nurture myself, until then I am thankful for my health.

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The Baby Bump Project by Meredith Nash is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.