My Story (Anonymous)

At 19 I found out I was pregnant. My boyfriend (now husband) and I were scared and shocked but we knew we wanted our little Angel. I worked for the first 7 months of my pregnancy as a Driver at a plumbing company. This kept my body in great shape and know one could even tell I was pregnant. Then we moved to PA to be with my family. The last two months I did not do much of anything. As a result my weight sky-rocketed from 135 to 179. I got stretch marks everywhere, thighs, belly, calves. Thankfully I have my sides tattoed with a Phoenix. This helped to hide some of the stretch marks. I also, stupidly left my belly ring in. It is not destroyed. I wear an over the top one simply to hide what damage it did from leaving it in. I had my son vaginally and every part of me felt worn out and ugly. I didn’t want my husband to touch me because I just felt disgusting. Thankfully I did not get postpartum depression very bad. The only thing I was unhappy with was the radical changes my body had endured. At 22 now, my son is 2 1/2 and he is healthy and I have struggled with my weight for quite some time. It was hard to get used to the fact that I was never going to look the same again. Finally I accepted it and decided that although my stomach might not be firm like it used to, my breasts will never be perky like they used to, and the stretch marks will always be there, I decided I didn’t care. I decided that I was still beautiful. I started to slowly work out so I could at least feel healthy again. I am now at 129 and I feel wonderful and I feel sexy again. A feeling that I have been missing since my son was born. This site has helped me to realize that I am not the only one with stretch marks as bad as they are, and I am not the only one thats breasts will never stand like they used to and it doesn’t matter because we are all beautiful and we are all mothers. Thank you so much!!!

FYI: White dress is a year before I got pregnant. Red dress is a year after I had my son, at my wedding. The rest are all current as of now since I have been working out a little more.

Pregnancies: 1
Age: 22
Children 2 1/2 yrs old

Five Years Later and Still 20lbs Heavier and Loving It – Confessions of a Skinny Girl (Anonymous)

I love what pregnancy has done to my body, beforehand I was skinny as a rail and super self-conscious of my body. People used to say that they were afraid to hug me because they thought I would break. I wore long sleeve shirts and pants my entire life to hide my “chicken arms and legs.” Some people can’t understand the woes of being too skinny, but it can have just as detrimental effects growing up as being overweight. I was so ridiculed and ashamed. Now I have a body that another human being helped me shape, it is round, soft and pudgy in places…and I love it. I feel more like a women than I have ever before in my life, I have curves and am now officially embraceable :)

Current Age: 34
Number of Births: 1

Photos: First picture I am 2 months pregnant. Second picture I am about 7 months pregnant. Third picture I am 9 months pregnant. Fourth picture I am 3 months postpartum. Fifth and sixth picture I am almost 6 years postpartum. Seventh picture is my baby girl at 3 months old (who is now a whopping 5 years old!)

After But Before (Colleen)

My previous submissions are here: (oh no I’m becoming a serial poster!)
One Year After a Cesarean
Ode to my Scar
Coming to Grips With a Cesarean

My age: 27
One pregnancy, one birth
My daughter is 21 months old.

I have to apologize; I like to take a few days to tweak my entries before submitting them and this one just kept getting longer and more ramble-y. I didn’t originally intend on writing quite so much!

A few weeks ago my husband fell while out on his daily bike ride. He’s okay, but he scraped up one knee pretty badly. I was looking at the scab one day to see how it was healing, and I noticed a large white stripe on the side of his knee.

I said, “Hun, is this a stretch mark?”

He replied, “where?”

“On your knee.”

“Yeah, probably. I’ve got them everywhere.”

My husband is not an overly large man. He is 5’8’’, and 195 pounds (a lot of which is muscle). Yet his thighs, butt, back, and—apparently—knees are covered in deep, wide stretch marks. They are flesh-colored, but they still lend an unmistakable texture to his skin. And you know what? He’s okay with them. “Okay” really isn’t the right word, he just doesn’t consider them at all. There’s nothing he can do about this gift that puberty gave him, so why stress about it? (When I let him read this post he stopped and looked at them, but he had to look around to see exactly where they were. They just aren’t on his radar normally).

I find it ironic that as I sat down to write this entry, I checked Facebook and Bonnie had posted the clip from Steven Colbert about ugly armpits and companies creating problems for women to “fix”, because that’s sort of what I was thinking about writing about.

The thing is, I’ve read several posts where women say “I already had stretch marks from puberty.” Nobody ever seems bothered by those marks, like my husband, but the vast majority of women HATE their pregnancy stretch marks. Why is that? Because we are told that we should. There are countless products out there made to “fix” and/or “prevent” stretch marks, and they invariably have a pregnant woman on the label. The message is that if you are growing yourself, stretch marks are fine, but if you are growing another being, they are not. And that’s just plain wrong.

I understand this, and yet I am still terrified that a future pregnancy will leave my stomach riddled with silvery lines, just like my hips are. It’s such a deeply ingrained cultural prejudice that I cannot seem to overcome it. But I was a junior in college before I EVER realized my mother had stretch marks. They faded to almost nothing and I didn’t care. Our children do not care about the marks that we gained in giving them life. We are perfect to them regardless. Isn’t it sad that what society deems “acceptable” is more important to us than our own children’s opinions?

I love my daughter more than life itself, but the thought of raising a girl in today’s culture scares the ever-living crap out of me. She’s small for her age but she eats like she’s facing a famine, so much that her little tummy gets distended and her shirts ride up. J I love to poke it and say “look at that belly!”, but sometimes I worry that she’ll take it to heart and start thinking she needs to eat less, or suck it in. And she is only 21 months old. She can’t possibly think that way yet but how do I know when she might? I want to raise a daughter who loves herself the way she is and realizes that she is beautiful, without pushing her over into outright vanity. It’s such a fine line and I’m afraid that I will step off of it and mess her up for life.

I have made no progress since my first post, 20 months ago. My indomitable self-confidence is starting to waiver. Some days I look in the mirror and look at my stomach in disgust. It isn’t big at all, but I see the line left by my underwear and feel like such a fatty. I had a very small pregnant belly and I still look like I did when I was 4 or 5 months along. But as I was standing in the shower earlier, sucking my stomach in to see what was fat and what was the natural curve of my body, I began to wonder why a flat stomach even matters. Women are not all meant to have flat stomachs. If that was “normal” for all human females, it would not be such a hard state to maintain. It bothers me that I’m upset about looking like a natural woman, a mother. I wish I had more friends near me who are mothers. Everybody I know with babies lives far away and none of my “everyday” friends have kids yet. It’s very hard to be confident or comfortable when you’re comparing yourself to untested, unstretched bodies.

Sometimes I feel like I have lost control of my life. I hate my job (yup, still the same one that I “wasn’t going to go back to”). I keep applying for new ones and I never hear a single thing back. It is discouraging, and my inability to get out of a horrible work situation has started to cause me to doubt other areas of my life too. Why can’t I eat better? Why can’t I finish painting the house we bought over a year ago? Why don’t I exercise? What, exactly—other than a beautiful little girl—have I accomplished in the five years since I graduated from college?

I have been slowly working on making my dinners healthier; I figure that’s something, at least. What I really need to do is exercise, for peace of mind as well as for fitness. There just always seems to be something more important to do than exercising. I don’t have enough (baby-free, work-free) hours in the day.

My husband is my inspiration. He is more dissatisfied with his body than I. He’s gained nearly 30 pounds since we started dating (8 years ago) and he hates it. He has an unfortunate metabolism that likes to add weight quickly and not give it back up easily. He took up cycling a few years ago, and this year he signed up for a 250-mile charity ride which he has been training religiously for. He’s only lost 10 pounds so far but he is so much trimmer and in much better shape. I figure if he can do it, why can’t I?

So here I am, 21 months post partum from my first baby, 8 months after I weaned her. I am considering these to be my “before” pictures—before I take control of my life, get my body to a healthier state that doesn’t nag at the back of my mind, and regain my self-confidence. If he can do it, I can do it, and I WILL.

Updated here.

Will I Ever Feel Comfortable in My Body Again? (Anonymous)

I have two beautiful children who I love with ALL of my heart, but I hate the way my body has changed since having them. I often hear people say, “I love my stretch marks because when I look at them I am reminded of my children” I don’t look at it that way at all…I see only stretch marks with no emotional meaning attatched to them, other than how sad they make me feel. I wish that I could get back to my body before babies but it seems just so far off. I don’t feel comfortable in clothes and am constantly checking what I look like in the mirror. I try to only buy loose fitting blouses as I don’t want any attention paid to my midsection. My breasts have completely dropped after two pregnancies and breastfeeding two infants. Will I eventually just accept that this is the way I’m going to look? Will I get the honest motivation to do something about this? I don’t know…I guess only time will tell.

Age 24
2 pregnancies
10 months post partum

Widowed, But Never Alone (Anonymous)

Age: 22
Number of births: 2
Ages: 4 years and 2 years

I had my first son when I was seventeen. It took almost two years before I decided to change anything about myself as I weighed almost fifty pounds more then I had before pregnancy. Shortly after getting my body back I lost my husband to the war and was pregnant with my second child. I did everything I could to not loose the hard work I had done and stayed healthy. It is a long struggle and I am still trying to get my body back but I know that things can never be the same. My children keep me strong and fighting everyday.

My Body is a Battlefield (Anonymous)

18 months post partum
1 pregnancy
1 birth by C-Section
Age:24

First I have to say – THANK YOU so much to the creator of this site and everyone who has participated. You have all made me feel sane and normal when I thought for sure I was losing my mind. Women are real, strong, beautiful, courageous people who deserve far more than to feel belittled by the cover of Cosmo magazine every time we go to the grocery store. Thank you to everyone fighting the good fight.

This is my story…

My body is my worst enemy.

Seriously.

But I still love it.

I’ve had body issues as long as I can remember – normal teenage girl stuff like most women. But when I became an athlete most of that went away. I swam division one in college. I was strong, muscular and fast. My body was thick, my shoulders were broad, I was still bigger than some girls on the team, but it did what it was supposed to do: it won races.

Through swimming I tore both of my shoulders and had reconstructive surgeries, gave myself permanent nerve damage in my right arm, made both of my knees crooked and painful to walk on, and had injections in my hips from painful bursitis. I had to quit swimming when they couldn’t fix the nerve damage. Ever since I’ve felt like my body is my enemy. It is not functional. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. I’m still living with the chronic pain.

I got married to an incredible man – the love of my life – after my junior year of college. Five months later we found out we were expecting! I managed to finish my degree and graduate, but I wasn’t happy about being pregnant. I had my own plans. But not anymore. My life became completed absorbed into my physical experience. My body didn’t handle pregnancy well. From 16 weeks of nausea, to heartburn, sciatica that made me fall down, to knees and hips that felt like they were going to fall out of their sockets. I worked out for 2 hours five days a week, untilI had pre-term labor that put me in the hospital at 30 weeks, then bed rest for the rest of the pregnancy. Then I had prodromal labor for five weeks and went directly into transition phase with no breaks between contractions when my water broke. After two hours of screaming my brains out ignored by the nurses in the hospital they discovered that the baby was breech, his heart rate was dropping and I needed an emergency C-section. My spinal didn’t take, so they had to knock me out. I woke up to see my husband holding a little bundle. He showed me our beautiful and perfect son. But I forgot quickly because I was still coming out of the anesthesia and he had to show me again several times.

I still grieve not actually “giving birth.” I’m sad that I didn’t hear my baby’s first cry or see him come out, mess and all. I’m sad that my husband didn’t either because he couldn’t come in the room when they knocked me out. Once again, I feel like, my body failed me.

As much as I HATED being pregnant I equally LOVE being a mother. My son is the light of my life and a constant joy! From the first second I saw him, everything was okay. I love devoting my life to my family, and any earlier feeling of being upset at graduating college to immediately become a stay-at-home mom is gone. There is nothing that could drag me away!

Recovery was rough, but the worst part was that my nerve pain became far worse after giving birth. I felt like someone was putting cigarettes out along my spine. I still had (and have) sciatica, knee pain, and hip pain. Some days I can’t walk up stairs or pick up my son. I became so injured when swimming because all of my joints are naturally loose or hypermobile, so they banged up easily with 20 hours of training each week. When pregnancy introduced the hormone relaxin into the mix, I literally fell apart. Now I hobble around, have nerve pain spiking out of every joint, and will be having major back surgery to fix my scoliosis and relieve the chronic pain.

We’re very excited to be adopting our next baby, hopefully this summer!, as we work with doctors to try to “fix” my body. I’m not sure if I will ever get pregnant again. Maybe one day. But we are committed to adopting this year, then we’re going to start an international adoption to adopt siblings a year or two from now. Learning about adoption and the plight of 143 million orphans around the world has seemed to help all of this make sense. If I am in this much pain so that I will give a mommy and a daddy to three orphaned children – then it is all well worth it.

My body image after birth was (is still is) pretty awful. My breasts became about 100% stretch marks. My tummy has them too, but I don’t mind them so much. My C-section scar is crooked. I have a wrinkle over my belly button – though I’ll admit I actually think its kind of cute. I still struggle to let my husband see me naked because all I see is fat, stretch marks, and loose skin. I assume that’s what he sees too. He thinks I’m crazy and tells me I’m gorgeous every single days without exception. Nonetheless, sSome days I don’t want to leave the house because my pants won’t zip or my shirt is too tight. I know that’s stupid. But on those bad days it takes over my mind. But I know that I am healthy and I know that I am a mother. I’m trying to grasp the fact that I can lose another 10 pounds, but I will still have stretch marks and loose skin. I need to come to grips with that. But it is so hard.

Because my body is constantly working against me, being in shape and managing my weight is a major priority in my life. The stronger I am and less I weigh (to a healthy extent of course!), the less pain I should be in and the better I feel in general. I hate my body, but I love it too. I want to take care of it. I want it to last another 50 years. I was to be strong, functional, energetic, and ready to live life. I do at least an hour of exercise and physical therapy six days a week. I eat as healthfully as I can (with cookies on the side), cook everything from scratch, and my whole family benefits from that determination.

Posting these pictures is a major part of my accepting my body for what it is: the good, the bad, and the painful. When I saw my most recent picture next to my picture of 9 months pregnant I thought: Wow. How can a body even do that? That is really incredible.

Pictures:
9 months pregnant – wow I was huge, but it was all out in front and you couldn’t even tell from behind
5 days post partum – all see is monster boobs! Milk is coming in!
2 months post partum – check out those bright red stretch marks on my breasts!
7 months post partum – still nursing. We just moved – its a mess!
18 months post partum – breasts went all the way back down
18 months post partum – stretch marks are all silver

Miracles Happen (SCS)

Previous post here.

age 30
number of pregnancies 4 and births 2
age of children 3 ½ and 5 weeks how far pp 5 weeks

First I wanna apologize for the long post, I wanted to say a lot. As everyone says, I love this site. I think I’ve read every entry on it. I posted in 2009 after my first miscarriage. My body has changed since then. In March of 2011 I suffered another miscarriage. It hurt a lot but I finally decided I was very happy with only have one child and I didn’t really want to have anymore. I did however want to know why I was having miscarriages. In June I finally had my appointment and I was very disappointed with the “Doctor” who seen me. My appointment was on a Wednesday and I told the doctor I was a week late for my period. I know my body ever since I started keeping track of my periods I’ve always been 28 days at 10am. Yep I was that predictable. Well, after the miscarriages I was 26 days. So when I told the doctor she blew me off by saying I haven’t had my period because I gained so much weight. I weighed 250lbs when I seen her, I had been stuck at that weight for almost 2 years by then. Well, at least she did do some blood tests only she didn’t test for me to be pregnant. On Friday I got a call saying I had a slow thyroid and that is why I was extremely tired and I gained so much weight and couldn’t lose anything regardless of how much I cute back and ate healthy or exercised. So I went to get the prescription but decided since it was almost the end of the day I would start them on Saturday. Well, Saturday morning I decided to take a pregnancy test, just to see what it said and I was sure surprised. I walked right out of the bathroom and showed my boyfriend. This I wish I would’ve waited because with all my pregnancies I had a really cute way to tell him. He didn’t show any kind of reaction I think mostly due to the worry I would lose this one too. So I called the hospital up to make sure it was ok to still take the medicine and they said yes to keep taking it. That Monday I called my family doctor to make an appointment so they can confirm it and I made an appointment with the obgyn. At the two appointments I was so scared they would tell me sorry but you aren’t pregnant so I cried every time they confirmed it.

every doctors visit from then on, I cried when I heard the babys heartbeat. My first born went to all my doc appoints and was even there to see the ultrasounds. So when I started my pregnancy I was 250lbs, I went down some then didn’t gain any until my 5 month. In total I only gained 8lbs by the time I had the baby. I weighted 258lbs when I went in for the scheduled csection on feb 23, 2011. The csection went well, other than me being extremely sick after due to the meds they had to give me to calm me down after they took the baby out since I couldnt breathe, I had a terrible cold and was breathing through my mouth through the whole operation since my nose was stuffed up and it went dry. I couldnt breathe or even have any spit in my mouth to wet my throat.

at my 2 week appointment when I stepped on the scale I weighted 231lbs. I was so excited to see I had lost so much. I have since got down to 224lbs which is what I am in the pictures below. The pregnancy picture I was probably about 258lbs since it was so close to when I had the baby. I am happy to say I am content with my body. I do want to lose some weight only due to the fact that I cant afford any new clothes and all my other clothes are only a size or two smaller. Im currently in size 18 and some of my nice clothes are size 16 or 14. So that isnt too far to go. However, I guess im content with my body because I’ve been hit with ppd. I cry all the time especially is I don’t get enough sleep, I don’t feel close to my newborn and really don’t want to hold him at all. Plus we are dealing with trying to survive on my boyfriend only having a part time job, but God will get us through this as He always has.

The last thing I want to say is that as I’ve read the different entries on this site it saddens me to see that most of the people who complain about the way they look, I see them and wonder WTH, you look great. And I noticed that a majority of the people who accept themselves are like me larger women. Either way everyone has their own issues thanks to all the media and the pressure to be skinny. Children are a blessing that a lot of woman will never be able to have. They would trade their great body for the chance to carry a baby. Just know regardless of your body, you were blessed and trusted with the greatest gift of all—a beautiful baby.

The Rewards of Patience (Amanda)

My husband and I have been together for almost nine years, and married for nearly seven. Having children was one of the first things that we talked about when we first met. I naively assumed that it would be easy, being that both sides of my family are very prolific. How wrong I was.

Our first loss occurred in March of 2004. I wasn’t even sure that I was pregnant. I just knew that I was ten days late (my cycle is like clockwork) and I started bleeding. A visit to the doctor confirmed that I had been about six weeks pregnant.

The second loss occurred nearly a year to the date later. I was late, took a test, got a positive, and started bleeding the next day.

The third loss happened in July of 2005, just four months after the second one. I carried this pregnancy for four days beyond my missed period.

The fourth loss…I got a positive, after trying one time, in September of 2008. Even though I cringed every time I went to the bathroom, expecting blood, there was none. Everything was going great. I heard the heartbeat and saw the baby in several ultrasounds, and I’d never felt better. I was growing and glowing. Then on December 11 (the day after my birthday), we went for our sixteen week checkup. They put the doppler on my belly, and we were excited to hear our baby’s heartbeat. There was nothing but silence in the room. They decided to take me to ultrasound to see what they could find out. As soon as they put the probe on my belly, I knew. I looked at the screen and my baby was there, but so still. I looked at the doctor and said, “My baby’s dead, right?” She apologized and told me that yes, it looked like the baby had quit growing at twelve weeks. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t keep a pregnancy before that…now this one kept going for a month after it should have. They called it a missed miscarriage. I had a D & C the following morning.

Loss number five was the following July. Once again, positive test, and then the bleeding started the next day.

Now the tests started in earnest. Nobody could find anything wrong. The good news was that I could get pregnant, and quite easily at that. We just had to find out how to keep me pregnant. My regular endocrinologist sent me to a reproductive endocrinologist, and they diagnosed me with a luteal phase defect…a progesterone deficiency. That’s IT? Don’t get me wrong, I was happy that the condition was treatable, but seriously, that’s something that should have been caught YEARS previous. Anyway, I was prescribed progesterone suppositories, to be used for the fourteen days following ovulation, and until twelve weeks if I fell pregnant. The low progesterone was making my uterine lining incompetent, and that’s why the fertilized eggs weren’t “sticking,” so to speak. I started the suppositories in November of 2009, and those were supposed to bulk up the uterine lining, making it nice and nutritious for a fertilized egg to stick to. I took an ovulation predictor on March 23, and it was positive. We hoped for the best. All the while, we were in the process of buying our first house. Now, I’m the kind of person who may as well have bought stock in pregnancy tests and ovulation predictors, and I can’t stand to have them laying around, unused. On April 7, we closed on our house. On April 8, I noticed that I had an unused digital test. It was only a day before my period was due, and I hadn’t had any symptoms or anything, but I thought what the heck. Usually, when I’d take a pregnancy test, I’d sit on the floor, hyperventilating and shaking, waiting for the lines to show up or waiting for the word “pregnant” to show up. This time, though, I took my time, finished going to the bathroom, zipped up, and glanced casually at the test sitting on the bathroom counter. There it was…a big fat PREGNANT. Ultrasounds to confirm a gestational sac and, ten days later, a heartbeat, all confirmed that things were fantastic.

I started wearing maternity jeans at seven weeks. I really did start to show that fast. I had many people ask me if I was carrying multiples, and I can’t say that the thought didn’t cross my mind. Our twenty week anatomy scan came and went, with the tech and the doctors remarking how perfect our baby was and how everything was measuring right on schedule. They gave me a due date of December 17…one week after my birthday. And every day, I grew bigger and bigger. Seriously. I was huge. Enormous. I gained 52 pounds, probably because the baby had me eating hot fudge caramel sundaes and drinking gallons of milk every night. (I hate milk, by the way.) Around thirty weeks, I was so big that I was already having trouble breathing. And walking. And getting out of the bath tub. And shaving…everywhere. But my roly poly little baby was kicking and punching away, all day, every day. And all night. I never got morning sickness (though everybody who was around me in the first few months of pregnancy got it for me…including my grandmother, who hadn’t thrown up in fifteen years. My father and my husband were sick, too. It’s called couvade. I thought it was hilarious.) I had no heartburn, no glucose troubles, nothing. As a matter of fact, it was like pregnancy fixed everything for me. I had bad acne before I got pregnant. It completely went away. I had terrible anxiety. During pregnancy, it was gone. And I was the opposite of constipated, which was awesome, because I had always been a once-a-weeker, if I was lucky.

Months went on and I grew and grew. I was afraid, like any pregnant woman, of the body changes that could and would happen. It made me feel ungrateful and horrible, though, when I thought about wearing a two-piece this coming summer, and wondered if I would be able to. I mean, we had struggled with having a baby for the better part of six years. What kind of jerk was I, worrying about what the baby was doing to my body? I should have been focusing on what I was doing to the baby’s body, and that was being its support system, the reason my baby was alive. So I did. But I won’t lie…every day, I asked my husband if I had gotten any stretchmarks on my belly yet. I was sure that it was only a matter of time. After all, someone can’t grow as huge as I did and not have a few battle scars. But I never got any at all, except two on my breasts (which turned into two hundred when I started nursing). I chalk that up to good genetics. Neither my mother nor either of my grandmothers got them on their bellies, so I guess I’m just stretchy.

We planned on a completely natural birth, attended by midwives, but I ended up having to be induced because they suspected he was big and I was a week overdue. I progressed quickly, with no epidural, but when they broke my water and found meconium, the contractions became unbearable and they advised me to get the epidural so they could speed things along. I got to ten centimeters in nine hours, but the baby wouldn’t drop down. The doctor said that she could crank up the pitocin all night, but he probably wasn’t going to get through my skinny little pelvis, so we decided on a C-section just to have it over with. It was Christmas Eve, anyway.

Once I was in surgery and the baby was coming out, I heard cries of “Oh my god, how beautiful!” and “It’s a boy!” They started trying to guess how much he weighed. I heard somebody say “Nine pounds six ounces,” and I laughed out loud. There was no way a baby that big just came out of my body. But the scale told a much more horrifying and impressive number…ten pounds and twelve ounces. Really?? No way!!! That was more of a shock than anything else in this entire experience. As the doctor was stitching me up, she said, “Well, your belly is gone now.”

I’m now 15 weeks and 4 days postpartum. These pictures were taken when I was 10 weeks and 5 days postpartum. The pregnancy photos are of my belly at 39w5d (black sweatpants) and 40w6d (teal tanktop, looking way past rough). I’ve also included a picture of my (not so) little guy, who is everything I’ve ever dreamed of and more. The white background is him at two weeks, there is one of him nursing, and the other is him at 9 weeks. The one in the paisley tank top is me before I got pregnant, and I’ve included a recent one of both of us, taken on March 31.

Believe it or not, I like my scar. You’d think that since it’s a reminder of how botched our birth plan ended up being, that it would signal failure to me. Actually, I think the opposite. I got to experience contractions and hard natural labor, contractions with an epidural, and a surgical birth. I got to experience a little bit of everything in Julian’s birth. My mother isn’t here anymore, but I have a scar just like she did. I came into the world through her belly, and it’s sort of appropriate, I suppose, that her grandson came into the world the day after her birthday (he was born on Christmas Eve, she on the 23rd, the day I was induced) via the same route that her daughter did. I refuse to look at my scar as a sign of failure on my part to not birth my son the way I had planned. He was huge! I don’t think he would have come out vaginally if I had stayed in labor for a week, and certainly not without me needing a few hundred stitches. I’m glad it happened the way it did. I weighed 142 when I got pregnant, and when I delivered, I was close to 200, and probably over it by the time they pumped me full of fluids. I’m back down to 155 now, but honestly, I don’t care if I don’t lose another pound. The weight that has come off (other than nearly twenty pounds of baby, placenta, water, and all that stuff) came off because of the breastfeeding, I think, because I haven’t done anything. It’s too cold to go running, and I don’t want to leave this perfect little creature anyway. It seems like pregnancy has redistributed my extra weight into sexy places that I never had it before. I’ve always had skinny hips, no butt, and no waist. I was always kind of straight up and down. Now I’m curvy. None of my pre-pregnancy clothes fit me yet. My thighs are a little meatier and I still have some extra skin. I don’t have any stretch marks, but my skin certainly stretched, and my pants won’t button over it even if I can manage to get them past my newly acquired thunder thighs. Yeah, as the weather gets warmer, more of the weight will probably drop off, but I’m happy the way I am. My body, this body that I thought would NEVER carry a baby to term, went above and beyond this time. I grew him on the inside and I continue to nourish him on the outside. It turns out that I was pretty good at this baby growing business, after all.

I think that we focus too much on the physical “shape” of a mother. What about the ways in which we transform emotionally? What is our “shape” once the empty areas have been filled in with the senses of accomplishment and pride and unfathomable, bottomless love that come along with having a child? Where there was a dull and aching void, now there is the warm fulfillment of wishes granted, of dreams brought to life. If our bodies have been changed, we should see those changes not only as humble sacrifices, but the same way as we view our emotional experience…to love someone more than you love yourself, your emotions have to go through a tremendous amount of expansion or stretching. Just as our bodies twisted out of the American society’s “ideal” shape, so did our lives, in ways more complicated, hard, and beautiful than I could ever have imagined. And if you’re truly honest with yourself, at the end of the day, what would you rather have? I’ll take the physical reminders that I grew a life inside me every single time as opposed to the emptiness and the sense that something was lacking that filled me before I had my son.

Age 28
6 pregnancies, one birth
15 weeks 4 days pp today, 10 weeks 5 days in the pictures

I have a website with chronological pictures of my belly here.

6 Months Postpartum and Still Healing (Jillyn)

I am posting my postpartum pictures here of my body after my second pregnancy. My previous post is here.

This pregnancy came a bit unexpected for my husband and I. After the birth and death of our first daughter we planned to wait a year before TTC again. But just 6 months postpartum we found out i was expecting again. By 6 months PP i hadn’t lost any of my pregnancy weight and I actually gained a bit. I believe i started my second pregnancy at around 215lbs (i am 5’5″). The pregnancy was an emotional time for me because i was still trying to deal with the emotions and grief of loosing our first daughter. We tried to keep things as peaceful as we were able. We had a midwife for the pregnancy and planned a homebirth.

I delivered our second daughter at 41 weeks and 2 days. Everything went wonderful and we have a very happy and healthy 6 month old (she was 7lbs and 20″ long at birth). I’ve still been struggling with my emotions this postpartum and i’m trying not to slip into depression but sometimes it’s hard, especially with a very high needs baby (most would say she had Colic). But there are many good times and she is such a blessing in our life. Our “rainbow” baby :)

The day i went into labor i weighed 250lbs and a couple weeks postpartum i believe i was around 230lbs. I’ve struggled with accepting my new body but i don’t 100% hate it. I hate how much my belly and hips droop with extra skin, but other than that i’m not too upset. I actually like my stretch marks and i think they are pretty cool (i thought they were cool before as well). One thing that i thought was neat was when i was pregnant with our first daughter i got stretch marks and they started to heal and were more white. Then when i started to stretch more at the end of this pregnancy you could see where my old stretch marks ended (from first DD) and my new ones began. The day i took these postpartum pictures (6 months) i weighed myself and i was 213lbs (and at 6.5 months PP i’m 208lbs!).

The pictures i posted are from 6 months postpartum. I tried to take pictures of all the changes. I included pictures of my worst stretch marks, ones inside my thighs. I have one on each side and they actually split so bad that sometimes they bled and i wasn’t able to walk properly. Even now one of them still splits sometimes (as you can see in the photo). Of course they were much bigger during the pregnancy (about 1/2″ wide and 3-4″ long!). I also took a close up shot of my stretch marks on my belly. And I included a couple pictures from at the end of my pregnancy :)

~Age: 23
~Number of pregnancies and births: 2 pregnancies, 2 births, both vaginal
~The age of your children, or how far postpartum you are: First DD died after birth, Second DD is 6.5 months. Pictures taken when i was 6 months PP.

2 Kids and Body Afterwards (Heather)

I had my first son at age 19. I was 115 pounds and a size three. In my pregnancy I went up to 198 pounds. My body never went to normal. For while i stayed at 165 pounds. Stretch marks on my inner legs ouuter upper legs vigina, boobs love handles belly almost every where . So a few years later I decided to have smart liop/. Now I have six scar from that and loose flabby belly. A year later I got pregnant again, and my stretch marks got worse on my boobs and are past my belly botton on my belly. I’m 23 now with a 4 year old and a one year old. I love my boys but hate my body… I’m a size 7,9 now and 136 pounds.. i had a c section with my 2nd.. i’m ugly.. I used to play sofe ball and be a cheerleader. Now no one wants to see me. I don’t even ghe the beach i can’t wear a one piece cause of the stretch marks on my legs whta do I do