Rethinking Body Image

Yesterday I got a new American Baby magazine, which I was apparently subscribed to after my first Motherhood shopping trip. Two articles caught my attention. The first, "Best Styles for Your Baby Bump" made me laugh out loud. Um, yeah right, how about whatever fits and doesn't cost a fortune? (This is as opposed to the $100 tunic featured on one page of the magazine.) The second article, "Dancing With the Scars", a woman's post-natal journey toward loving her body through belly dancing, among other things, proved more thought provoking and appropriate for my journey.

Pregnancy has come with all sorts of feelings that I had not expected. My gratitude, wonder, and joy over becoming a mother and having the privilege of actually growing this little girl inside of me has been tempered with a variety of weird, frustrating, and disgusting "symptoms", and something else too...shame. Yep, shame.

From the moment I found out I was pregnant, I began to worry. Would I gain too much weight? Would I show too soon? This self-talk was only made worse by the comments of others...referring to my "center spread", telling me my baby would be big because I was already big, etc.. Only days after seeing that positive pregnancy test, I enrolled in several developmental email services, only to find that they came with unsolicited almost daily emails about exercise, nutrition, and weight gain.

Over Christmas break, I read a wonderful book, Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat?, which confirmed what I was already sensing. The already enormous pressures on women to achieve impossible and unnatural levels of thinness and beauty only magnify when she becomes pregnant. It seems ridiculous. Healthy pregnancy automatically means weight gain and drastic bodily changes, yet somehow we're made to feel as if we will avoid these things if we eat and move in the "right" ways.

The author of "Dancing With the Scars" struck a powerful chord with me when she wrote that she realized that with every look at her marked mid-section, she desperately wished to look as if she had never been pregnant. This realization led her to another...motherhood had profoundly changed her in every way possible. Her body was no exception, nor should it be.

Her epiphanies led to some of my own. It occurred to me that I have spent many days wishing the same thing. I want and already love this baby more than I can say, but I've been hoping that I could conveniently grow and birth my daughter without the extra poundage, strange silhouette, wardrobe crises, etc. Why should something as earth shattering as motherhood not change the very vessel I live my life in? Why shouldn't the profound miracle of growing this baby in my own body mark every part of me?

Along this journey, I've learned a few things with my head that I'm still working on in my heart. First, my attitude toward my body will certainly shape the way the little girl I'm growing views hers. So while I want to teach her to make healthy choices, I want her to celebrate who she is, how she's been made, and the wondrous things that her body can do. That means knowing what's important about her body, and for me, there are two things. First, I have been created by a great and loving God who has called me good. Living life in this body is truly an act of worship. Secondly, my body is a vessel, created to do some amazing things. So while it may not look the way I'd like, it's lived a lot of life and it's creating a miracle. So in the words of Anne Lamott, "it's perfect in every way that's important". And indeed, it is.