How Baby

As you know, I’ve been weightlifting for three months now, and I’ve been having a lot of feelings about it – some that I touched on in the blog of that comic, some that are new.

It’s no secret that I’ve struggled with body image since giving birth, going through cyclical phases of acceptance and alienation. We talk a lot about weight after giving birth, an easily measured value, as if weight alone can stand for all of the many, many ways pregnancy and childbirth wreaks havoc on our bodies, for the ways large and small in which our own bodies become strangers to us; as if by simply ‘losing the baby weight’ we will somehow ‘get our bodies back’.

(“How does it feel to have your body back?” is something I was asked a lot after giving birth, a well-meaning question that completely fails to understand that the answer is simultaneously ‘never‘ and ‘my body has been here the whole time’.)

What do you do, though, on the Inside? How do you come to terms with the fact that the body, a domain in which you have been the sole ruler, has changed in ways that were utterly out of your control? How do you both mourn and begin to accept the body-stranger?

For the past six and a half years, so many things have happened to my body that were out of my control – TTC sex schedules, pregnancy itself, the indignity of labour, PPD, triggering experiences with breastfeeding, irreversible body changes, new ailments, etc… My body had become something that I felt trapped in, unrecognizable to me.  Made foreign by the capricious external powers of motherhood.  Monstrous.

No amount of people telling me I was beautiful or strong helped, because I was the person trapped in this prison, not them. I couldn’t be patient and admire the miracle of my imprisonment.

I couldn’t just ‘love myself’ because ‘loving yourself’ is not a switch you can turn on.

Much like how I didn’t immediately LOVE LOVE LOVE Momo as soon as she was born, love for my body couldn’t be wished for, shamed, or cajoled into existence. Loving Momo took time. It took labour. It took, yeah, allowing myself time to grieve the person I would never be again. Like tilling a field and waiting for it to grow, I had to put the same labour into cultivating ownership of my body again.

So, weightlifting. So, my body is changing again… only, for the first time in six years, it’s been in a way that I control. And that’s been, in a word, life-changing. When I look in the mirror now, I don’t feel a foreign body; I see myself. I see the land in which I have planted my flag and said this is mine, and I control it.

Weightlifting probably isn’t for everyone (though I encourage you to try it if you’re curious!), but the lesson I took six years to learn feels universal: you have to do the labour of loving yourself before you’ll be able to love yourself. It doesn’t come from outside.

Wishing you all self-compassion and strength as we muddle through it together, as always.