I Wonder (Anonymous)

~Number of pregnancies and births: 1/1

I’ve been reading your stories for the last 6 or 7 months and am just like a whole bunch of you – in a shirt I look great. With my shirt off, the extra elephant gathers at the bottom of my tummy were making me feel horrible about myself. The picture of Julia Roberts on the beach with a belly like mine made me cry. Now I just don’t care. Because I’ve realized that my husband loves me no matter what, and I love what I have done. I GREW A PERSON!!!

I wonder what North American ‘culture’ has done to us. We often blame the media. Because all they show us is beauty. But why do we give them so much power? It’s up to us to say ‘NO!’ To look past all the crap they’re trying to shovel down our throats. What do you think Heidi Klum or Angelina Jolie look like in the midsection? Sure some people bounce back, but after 4 babies ? Twins? And as crappy as it is for us to compare ourselves to them, I wonder how they feel – they either have to feel beautiful in their own skin, or they have to cave to all the pressures they’re under and get plastic surgery. And if they felt comfortable in their own skin, don’t you think we’d be seeing it?

I wonder. Did our grandmothers worry about what their stomachs looked like when they had their shirts off?
I like to believe that they had more important things to care about – stuff that really mattered. Like if their babies were going to grow up healthy. Or grow up at all.
Our lives have become too easy – that’s got to be the only reason we have time to worry about what we look like under our clothes to ourselves and our significant others.

If I spent all day cooking for my husband laboring in the field, or wondering if we were going to get enough rain for the crops to have money to buy necessities for our family, or worrying about my son in the trenches of some war, or wondering if my baby was going to get whooping cough or small pox or polio, or hoping we were going to be able to save enough for a good dowry for our daughter, or praying that my daughter was going to have more opportunities than me, or ….

What about the women who have lived through ethnic cleansings – genocides, famines? If we had to worry about our families being killed, or our babies starving to death, would we care so much about our bodies? Would we care at all?

I’ve decided that there have been and are a lot worse things in this world than a bit of extra skin.

Like the beautiful baby boy sleeping beside me. I’m going to give him a kiss and be thankful that all I really need to worry about is if his second toe is going to straighten itself out, or if he’s going to need some sort of little foot surgery in the future that’s covered by my healthcare. Because that’s what matters.

Updated here.