Author: Bonnie (SOAM)

This isn’t exactly on topic, but it deals with what brings many of us here to this site anyway. There is some sexual material in this video.

Thanks to Navelgazing Midwife for the link!

Im 27 years old and the mom of a beautiful 17 month old girl.

Ive never had a very good body image, and have always been particularly unhappy with my belly. A few years before I got pregnant, I completely changed my eating and exercising habits, and lost about 30-35 pounds over the course of 2 years, bringing me down to my pre-pregnancy weight of 172, not a bad weight for my 5’9″ frame.

I got pregnant very quickly once we started trying, but had a difficult pregnancy; I was in a lot of discomfort and pain most of the time. Here is one of the rare pictures of me during my pregnancy, at about 38 weeks:

A few days after this picture was taken, I was admitted to the hospital for toxemia. After ten days of bed rest and several failed attempts to induce labor, I delivered a healthy and beautiful 8lb girl via c-section. I had gained over sixty pounds.

Its been frustrating that my body has been so slow to recover, especially since I had worked so hard to lose weight before. A month or two ago, I saw an article in Parents magazine about a woman who had a tummy tuck because a year or so after giving birth to twins, her belly was still flabby and ugly. The article showed pictures of her tummy before the procedure. When I saw them, I cried. Id been trying to hold back the negative body image thoughts, telling myself I was just taking extra time to lose the baby weight. But these before pictures of the ugly, flabby belly didnt look so foreign to me; they looked a lot like my belly. Maybe there really was something wrong with me.

When I saw the pictures on this web site, I cried again, this time out of relief. I was right the first time. My body is slowly recovering, and this is part of what it means to be a mom. So here I am today, 17 months postpartum, and about 15 pounds (and two pant sizes) from my pre-pregnancy weight.

Im still frustrated that I havent made more progress, and Im frustrated with my body because, while I was blessed to conceive easily, Ive had such a difficult time being pregnant, delivering, and recovering physically and emotionally from pregnancy. But now this is part of that healing too. This is the most liberating thing I think Ive ever done. Thank you so, so much for this space to share my belly and my story.

Mama D is a Super Mom and a Super Woman!

Susan takes a stand!

20 years ago, my belly held a 6 pound baby and I had gained 90 pounds during the pregnancy. At 36 weeks of pregnancy, I measured 48 centimeters; an enormous amount of fluid stretched me so that it looked like a bear gashed its claws across my stomach and hips. You can barely see the silvery lines, but they are all still there. I only got the stomach flap in the last year when I became disabled for awhile and gained 50 pounds. I am on my way back down and think the flap will also go away, or at least shrink.

I haven’t had the same vanity issues other women have and can walk around naked without a problem. Gaining weight, however, has brought a new appreciation for women’s image concerns. Fat on others has never bothered me. Fat on myself, I want gone. The skin is always here to stay.

Not seeing many fat women on your site, I felt it was important to add some photos of a fat woman. This belly housed three children, from almost 9 pounds to 10.5 pounds – the last child is now 20 years old. I’ve also had a gastric bypass and initially lost 200 pounds, so my skin is very stretched from that as well. All stretch marks came during pregnancy (except a few on my hips that came with puberty) and the sagging pannus has always been there – since my mid-teens.

I write as if it doesn’t pain me to see how much flesh I own, but it does. This site is helping me feel some better, but we need to see a lot more fat here. C’mon women… show some flesh!

I have always had a poor body image and struggled with yo yo weight. It took us 10 months to conceived this baby which I know isn’t very long, but when you’re going through it it feels like a lifetime. I was convinced that I would never get pregnant, so when it did happen is was such a shock and I don’t think it has even sunk in now that I’m 19 weeks. Part of me still thinks this is just fat, I can’t really believe there is a baby in there!

This website has really helped me see the beauty of my body, this body that is carrying my child and nurturing this tiny life. I can’t wait to have this baby and be a mummy, but part of me is still scared of how much my body might change and that one day I might look in the mirror and not recognise myself.

Already my body has changed, my already large breasts have turned into barrage balloons, covered with blue veins! My belly is growing and I fear that the stretch marks I received during puberty will increase! I guess only time will tell, and I hope when I look in the mirror in 6 months time I will be able to see the beauty of my body.

This is me at about 14 weeks.

And this was last night at 19 weeks + 3 days.

I am 24 years old. I have 2 beautiful children, that left me with a not so beautiful body. My daughter will be 2 in 8/06 and my son was born 3/06. So 2 children in under 2 years, gave me not much time to “snap back” in between. After looking at this site, I really don’t feel as badly about my body and I once did. My pregnancy with my daughter I didn’t get many stretch marks, my son was another story though. My daughter graced us with her presence after 41 weeks of pregnancy, my son had to be helped into this world, I was induced for him at 42 weeks pregnant. With my daughter I gained within the recommended weight range and dropped 15lbs of that just by giving birth. With my son I was up to 206lbs, 4 days before delivery. I was so embarrassed of “gaining too much” and “being too big” that I do not have any pictures of me pregnant with my son. I regret that and probably will for a very long time.

Here I am at 26 weeks my 1st pregnancy…This is my favorite belly picture…just the beginning of a little bump.

38 weeks…

and now almost 4 months postpartum from number 2

For those of you Flickr-savvy go join the new group and add your photos to the pool! (As far as I know, the photos must not be private, so no nudity allowed there, but there are plenty of beautiful shots we can share anyway.)

This blog has been up and running for over two weeks now and I could never have guessed how much it would have changed me. I’ve realized since March or so that I wasn’t alone, but my outlook on the female body – on my own body – has completely and utterly changed since July 5th. I’ve seen so many stretchmarks over the past weeks that it is the norm to me now. I see them as beautiful. And I don’t mean I see the beauty in them – cause I was always able to see that to a degree – but I see the marks themselves, specifically, as beautiful.

Growing up I always hated my body. Likely I would not have admitted it because I knew was “wrong” to think I was fat, but I could not stop comparing myelf to all the thin girls with taut tummies and thin thighs. I never was overweight, but I also wasn’t terrifically toned. Oh, but the numbers… I somehow had this idea in my head that 125 pounds was The Right Weight. And so when I hit that at 12 years old, 5’2″ tall, and then continued growing, I felt sick to my stomach by the time the scale read 160 pounds when my 5’9″ body graduated high school. Looking back, I realize that’s a totally acceptable weight for my frame (and I’d kill to be there now! But I won’t give up my white chocolate M&Ms and herein lies the true problem, no?) but at the time, I was completely crushed. I worked sound for my high school’s show choir and I’d sit there and watch the girls with their beautifully thin arms do “jazz hands” yet, when I tried to replicate it in the bathroom mirror (HA yes, now you know I dance in the bathroom for myself – you know you do it, too!!!), I saw giant flabby marshmellows bigger than my head. Funny thing: looking at old pictures recently I discovered that my own arms were thin and beautiful back then! Why couldn’t I see it? Even though I struggled against hating my body, even though I told myself over and over again, “I’m not fat!” I felt I was. It makes me grieve for what I had back then, and it breaks my hear to know the pain that girl once felt.

I have no pictures of my unscarred tummy and I wish I had because that memory has been washed from my mind now. All I can see is this loose, striped flab. I just wish I could have a realistic glimpse of what I really looked like back then.

But now that I’ve got this site, honestly for the first time ever I am feeling less and less shame about my body! I no longer feel like I have to hide my ugly tummy from my family! I’m far from wearing a bikini, but that is more due to my own feelings of nakedness, rather than from shame.

I was talking to a friend about this site and mentioned letting my 4 year old daughter see it. My friend joked that I shouldn’t scare her about pregnancy yet, but I really believe that if these images are there in her brain now – even just subconsiously as she walks through the room when I have the site up – if these images are there, maybe, just maybe, she will have a better idea of what “normal” is. Maybe it won’t be so painful to her to look in a mirror. Perhaps she will have a better idea of what she really looks like. I want both of my children to know what women, and people in general, truly look like. I want them to know normal.

Anyway, it’s late and I’ve rambled on for long enough. Thank you to each and every woman who has participated or left a comment or passed on the link or even just been touched by it. I feel like we are coming together to create this amazing thing, let’s push it forward so everyone can benefit!

My own pictures (you can see my current belly up at the top of this site or on the “Who I Am” page)…

Fresh ZebraBelly stripes at the end of my first pregnancy.

4 Weeks pregnant with #2. I took this photo totally for myself, never expected to share it with even my own husband, let alone the internet. I had completely forgotten about this until recently and since it’s not longer shameful to me, here it is. Even still, the shorts are carefully obscuring the fat flap.

12 weeks pregnant. I stopped taking bare-bellied photos after this for the most part. I couldn’t stand to look at them.

28 weeks. Laying on my back always seemed to help the fat fall into the right places, so I took a shot of my belly button popped halfway out. It never did fully pop, and I think my son was right underneath it in this picture.

We had a little fun with henna at my blessing about a month before my son was born. I never did get new stretchmarks with the second pregnancy.

Caren has written her own entry here.