Postpartum

Age: 36
Number of pregnancies/births: 5/2 (both c-sections)
Children aged 5 years and 14 months

I’m 36 years old and fascinated by your website! What a great idea to show realistic photos of women who have given birth.

Here’s my story:
My first child was born in 2008. It was my first pregnancy and, being overweight, I started with187lb (I’m only 5,2ft).

At the end I weighed 209 lb and I had a c-section which wasn’t planned at all and which left me very unhappy for a long time.

To my surprise all the weight I had put on was gone after 4 weeks (a lot of water) and also my stretchmarks didn’t look so bad. However, my belly looked worse than before the pregnancy and even then I hadn’t liked it.

In the following I lost and gained weight as so often in my life.

And we wanted to have another child, but unfortunately I had 3 miscarriages, all in the first trimester.
My 5th pregnancy was successful again! I started and ended with the same weight as in my first pregnancy and again it was a c-section after endless hours of labour.

Breastfeeding worked a lot better than with child #1, but after 2 months I didn’t have enough milk anymore and had to stop.

My weight went from 209 lb down to 194 lb in the weeks after birth but then it stopped and I felt very uncomfortable.

So I decided to change my lifestyle and within a year I lost another 62 lb. I feel so much better and with 133 lb I’m as thin as I had been about 10 years ago.

With clothes on I find my shape pretty ok now , but things look different when I’m naked. My belly has never been nice and flat, but now it’s wrinkly and saggy (in the pictures it looks better than in reality). Also my breasts don’t look like they used to, but still I find them quite nice. Other than my belly which somehow feels as if it doesn’t belong to me as it really wobbles around. For the extra skin I think this won’t become any better or nicer. I was even thinking about surgery, but when I found this website I saw that many women have a belly like mine and that it’s nothing uncommon for a woman who was pregnant.

First I need to excuse my bad english, which is not my mother language. I am a 34 years old german mother of two wonderful children. The first, my daughter, was a c-section, my son was born vaginally. My daughter ist 3.5, my son 1.3 years old.

I love this website, it gives me so much reading the posts of moms who feel the same way than me. For a very long time I hadn’t had the heard to post here because I know objectively seen I don’t look that bad. I was lucky getting no strechmarks and having an almost flat belly. I got varices in my second pregnancy. It needed to be operate on and my disorders are gone. But my legs still don’t look fine, and never will.

But, however, I am struggeling with how my breast looks like. My breast never was very big, but beautiful. They had a nice shape and were perky. Now they‘re tiny, saggy and flat! Unfortunatly I have no picture from my non-mommy breasts. I always wore a 34B before heaving children. Now I had a brafitting and know this had never been my true size (I wear a 30D now!). So you may have an idea of my “old breast size”. During pregnancy and breastfeeding time my breast was huge (for me), (fitted) 30F in my second pregnancy! During my first pregnancy it was even bigger and I wore absolutely crazy sizes that hadn’t fit.

I find that my “new“ post-partum breast doesn’t fit to the rest of my body. I am slim but I always had kind of a “latino bottom“ and “strong legs“. I was not happy about this in the past, but it’s ok. This is me, I ever looked like this. But I feel like this breast is not mine! As if it have lost its sexual attractivity. I feel so unwomenly! This breast could look fine when I was a skinny, petite type. My breasts alway were a part of my body that I liked and sometimes even loved. I had been happier if they would have been one size bigger, but most time I was ok with them. My legs and sometimes my bottom had been my biggest body issues over the years. Now I don’t matter about them and hate my breast. I really don’t know I can learn to love or like them again.

Like most women‘s husband here my husband loves my body and breast. He just dosen’t love my self-insecurity and is tired to hear. That is a problem because he is my very best friend and now I dare to speak with him about my feelings for my body afraid of he could be turned off. I’m not sure if this is the right english formulation for what I want to say, so I hope you can understand what I mean. I have no one to talk with about my worries neither none of my friends beeing afraid I could hurt someones emotions when I speek bad about my body knowing or wondering if she is struggeling more with her body than me.

I breastfed both children for 10 months. I stopped brestfeeding my son 5 months ago. My breast has already got a little better since then. I hope and pray that it will regain volume in one or two years. I need to admitt that I’m jealous of most women here, they all sem to have more breast than me.