The mother's body

This article on mothering.com helped me begin to put words to how being a mother has changed my embodied self. I'm still struggling with it, but that piece (though only tangentially related) helped me understand why I found my birth injuries so distressing and why I find parenting so restorative.

Coming of age, I've generally had a fairly stable truce with my body. As a kid and teen I felt athletic (I did a few sports) and neither fat or especially thin. I was free of injury or chronic problems. I felt unusually tall between 5th grade and 8th (which I hated) until a lot of the other girls caught up; now at 5'8" I feel sort of medium-tall.

I was blissfully free of body-image issues until ** BLAM ** I went to Girls Nation the summer before my senior year. There we were, a week in DC with two "senators" from each state. We had to wear dresses and white gloves all week (gotta love the American Legion Auxiliary). I wasn't into dresses, so I ended up cobbling together a wardrobe that was both unfashionable and unflattering. And meanwhile the entire southern contingent was made up of girls who compete in pageants. Impossibly elegant and poised, and slim, slim, slim. Almost overnight I went from feeling more or less neutral about my body to feeling like a dumpy, coarse peasant (which also had to do with being a working-class kid completely out of her element.)

With feminist resolve, I gradually made my peace with my build. I weighed 148 when I graduated HS, and at the time I thought I should weigh 120. Never mind that when I first hit my adult height I weighed 130 and looked all knobby and weird. In my adult life I've been somewhere in the 150s and sometimes pudged up into the 160s. A couple years ago I was in the high-140s and it felt super-skinny.

I tried to focus on what my body could do (I was a division II state champ shot-putter!) and not what it looked like. I had a real breakthrough in that direction when I came of age sexually. It helped me come to really like my body. For two days each cycle I felt fat and vaguely "doomed" but I learned to just wait it out and observe it as an interesting trick of the mind.

If I thought about it at all, I experienced my body as tidy and under control. Apart from the scars of a tomboyish rural childhood and a car crash when I was 8, mono as a teen, dengue fever as a grad student, and some little shin or knee pain when I used to run more, I had always been pretty free of injury or illness. When I came off the pill at 30 (after 10 years on) to discover that my cycles were persistently irregular, I didn't give it much thought.

Struggling to conceive, then miscarrying and then being benched challenged my view of my body as competent, but I still started this last pregnancy with confidence. I wasn't psyched to start the pregnancy at 166 lbs, but I figured I could handle it. And up until the SPD pain settled in, I felt good.

Looking back, part of why I found the SPD so distressing is that I felt like my trade-off for being of sturdy peasant build (rather than a slim WASPy one) was that I wasn't supposed to have problems like this. It was unfair, and it ruptured my sense of my body, my sense of myself.

The sturdy peasant paradigm also explains why I was so surprised and distressed by the birthing injuries. Sturdy peasants don't get serious tears and then have lingering problems! After the birth, my body was not at all tidy. I was bleeding from my injuries, discharging the lochia, dripping milk, frequently wet with baby spit-up, sprinting to the bathroom to avoid accidents (I didn't always make it), and feeling puffy and slack all over.

And, the piece-de-resistance, I had to go to the friggin' ER the day after we got home from the hospital to get a giant rock-hard stool (that had been packed down during delivery) taken out by hand, after all the undignified home remedies failed to work. I had to give my BMs a manual assist myself for a couple weeks, despite the Colace. I should have just gotten some latex gloves; instead I was constantly scrubbing my hand like Lady MacBeth.

I felt utterly broken; not just my body, but my self.

Now, three months later, I feel restored -- not the same, but whole in a different way. For one thing I feel suddenly middle-aged, in preservation mode. Once I was feeling a whole lot better in the pelvic region, I slacked off on my Kegels and my problems started to come back. Now Kegeling is like a prescription I'll have to take for the rest of my life to avoid being one of those old ladies who fart a lot and wear Depends.

I've lost weight (157 and falling). I feel energetic and muscley again. Though my ab muscles are normal, my tummy still feels really soft from the outside. I actually like it. It feels feminine, like that famous painting of Venus on the half-shell. Though I don't have any similar affection for my floppy, spongy butt.

That soft tummy comes from pregnancy and birth, but the lioness' share of my restored sense of bodily self is from parenting, somewhat akin to what the author describes in that Mothering piece. I love, love, love it when DJ is comforted or delighted by my voice, my face, my touch, and I love that wonderful warm rush from holding him close so many times a day. It's a transcendental sense of my body as shared; it's sort of like becoming sexual, except without all the adolescent sturm und drang (thank gawd).

I'd be so interested to hear your stories. I imagine our experiences are all very different in these subtleties.