I love my body, except when I don’t
On the non-linear road to accepting yourself and what children have taught me
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I have what is known as a C-section shelf. You may have also heard it called a C-section bulge, pooch, flap, or, I reluctantly quote, a “mummy tummy overhang”. It is caused by scar tissue from the surgery, which combined with body fat and skin stretched from pregnancy, creates a pocket of tissue that juts out and over where the incision was made. Our friend the internet is clear we’re not meant to like this postpartum addition. Google is full of searches for ways to get rid of it. Plastic surgery sites will tell you that often liposuction and a tummy tuck is the only way you can.
There is something especially sinister about the physical pressures placed upon women after they’ve given birth. The ruthless turnaround from patriarchal celebration – almost deification – of the pregnant body (consider those soft-lit photos of a perfectly smooth bump, the woman’s actual head out of shot, irrelevant; her fertility the truly holy thing here) to judgement when she does not ‘snap back’ once the baby is born. The sharp switch from oohs and coos to tuts and sighs if she holds on to her gained weight or doesn’t drag her sleep-deprived, battered body to a bootcamp the moment the placenta is out.
Nine months since my second son was born, an invisible chorus snipes at me to snap back – it pressures me from newspaper sidebars, takes shot through targeted ads. I know I should ignore it because I, like most millennials and Gen Z, long ago endorsed the notion of body positivity. The call to love ourselves, increase visibility of different kinds of bodies, and to challenge the narrow beauty standards that yield so much money for advertisers while smashing self-esteem in the process.
But here’s the issue. I don’t love my C-section shelf. I can’t just yet. In fact, I kinda hate it.
When I first stumbled across #bodypositivity on Instagram nearly a decade ago, I knew I’d found something radical. Body positivity? Wow. What was that? (Raise your hands now if you too grew up in the ’80s/’90s.) After years of hating my own body, restricting food, bingeing, yo-yo dieting, discovering body positivity was LIFE CHANGING. This is not an understatement. Combined also with the discovery of exercise for mental health rather than as a means to shrink myself, and I was sold. I knew I had to write about it.
And so I did. When not many people were. This was when I was working in-house at Glamour magazine, circa 2013, when most lifestyle titles only wrote about exercise and nutrition for weight loss. Writing about appreciating your body, regardless of size, was relatively untrod ground then and I think we did a decent job of laying some small new roads not traditionally taken at that point in women’s magazines.
But I stopped writing about my body so much a few years ago because I realised other more urgent, marginalised voices needed to talk about theirs. And because I felt like the pressure to love my body became too much. I grew unsure what this type of love should feel like, or how to show it. I valued my body, but if love was high-fiving my reflection or putting a photo of myself in my underwear on Instagram, then I couldn’t quite reconcile with that. And so I felt like I was getting it wrong. I wondered whether ‘body neutrality’ was what I needed more.
As I stand in the mirror and pull at my C-section shelf – this part of my belly that falls into the shape of a wide smile over my 15cm scar – body positivity has deserted me. I dissect my reflection as if through the looking glass I hope to Alice-In-Wonderland myself back into my pre-baby body. Not the whole body, actually. Mostly just this bit. I rather like the scar – red and raised though it is. Because it tells a story. Of two difficult births and the safe passage of my beloved boys into my arms. But this… shelf. I hate it. Having it called a shelf probably doesn’t help. I am not an IKEA catalogue.
But it is also a matter of disconnect. My stomach doesn’t match the image of my body that, through 30-plus years of looking at myself in the mirror, is imprinted in my head. My shape is unfamiliar to me. As is the reality of many postpartum bodies – often hidden, judged or airbrushed. I rarely see this C-section ‘side effect’ on anyone else. I think that is part of the problem.
And yet, a little voice of dissent grows louder inside me by the day. Maybe it’s because I am too damn tired, maybe it’s because chocolate biscuits got me through the fourth trimester and I owe them big time, maybe it’s because I feel more rooted in myself and appreciate what my body has been through to get me here, but I don’t have time for all that shame. This little voice says, with increasing volume, Please fuck off, I just don’t care.
It is not really that I love my body more, it’s that I think about how I look less. And I mostly have my children to thank for this. They seem to love me exactly as I am. I want them to know that matters.
Earlier this month, I went on holiday to the South of France with my husband and kids. Every day went a bit like this: swim, lunch, rest, swim, dinner, bed. The paddling pool was our kingdom. My two sons suddenly amphibious, loving the water as though it was their natural habitat. Unlike me, who has never felt very comfortable in a swimming costume. Who grew up learning what clothes were flattering and prefers not to be exposed. Usually, I like to hide under a towel as quickly as I can. Only this time, I couldn’t.
“Mum, Mum, lift up your legs and make a bridge,” said my three-year-old.
“Mum, Mum! Let me climb on your back so you’re a tractor.”
And when he threw his beach ball out of the pool and we watched it roll down a steep grass verge:
“Mum, Mum, let’s race,” he said with glee.
I didn’t have time to overthink. Out we both jumped from the shallow water, dashing down the hill to retrieve the ball. Only briefly did it occur to me, ‘Everyone can see my thighs wobbling about, oh god, my costume is clinging to my belly, I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to do this…’ But then I realised, as my boy skidded to a halt beside me and grabbed the Paw Patrol ball in delight, none of that mattered. It really, really didn’t.
There is a wide and rocky terrain stretching between hating your body and loving it; somewhere in that landscape, it is OK to drop your flag and take a break for a bit. Loving yourself is not an insurmountable summit, but it does not have to be the daily destination. I don’t want to invest all my time in trying to love my body, I want to exist beyond it. I want to step out into the world, unthinking of it. Proud of it, maybe, content by it, yes, but mainly I want to be indifferent.
As my son and I stumbled back up the hill to the pool, I realised I was thinking about nothing more than his joy, and mine. As grown-ups, we often believe our main role is to teach our children, but it is often they who make us realise we have so much to learn. They gift us the ability to stay in the present, we watch them inhabit their body, unashamed. We need to help them stay that way by trying to do it more ourselves.
And so I will keep trying. I’m not a failure for struggling to accept every inch of this new body. I don’t have to hand in my ‘feminist’ card. But I do need to remind myself what’s really important in life.
And as for this ‘shelf’ of mine? My body is not furniture, but it definitely is a home. I am grateful for it.
Love this. The push to love every part of yourself always, as if body parts or normal body things can only be acceptable if they're beloved or considered beautiful, drives me a bit nuts. I've written about this before--things like "rebranding" stretch marks into "tiger stripes" to make them more positive/palatable. I don't think we have to. They can just exist. I don't think every part of our bodies needs to be empowered or thought of positively for them to just be fine. Sometimes it's nice to just not care at all.
Great piece, thank you. I'm 12 weeks post partum after a c-section and totally relate to the feeling like a stranger in my own body. It's such a strange combination of emotions...annoyance at myself for not being more conscious of what I was shovelling down me during pregnancy, guilt for caring so much about my body at this special time, and then also pride for what it achieved. There really is nothing that can prepare you for this rather muddled aspect of motherhood!