Motherhood and Body Image: A Love Story?
A woman and her body, what a relationship! It can be tumultuous, loving, and highly dysfunctional at times. At least, mine has been all of those things at some point in my life. I have hated my body, I have loved it, I have questioned and tested it. Sometimes I have been the abuser in the relationship, sometimes I have felt abused. It’s a love story for the ages, with all of the challenges and obstacles you would expect from such a tale. I think, for me, it’s a story worth telling, because it’s a story that’s not told enough. I want every woman to see her relationship with her body as a love story, not a horror story, because a woman’s body does truly deserve to be adored. This is my story about my body and our relationship as we’ve navigated motherhood, one that began way before I ever got pregnant, and one that I’m still writing every day.
I’m sure many of us can remember going through puberty, watching our bodies stretch, grow, and change without any power to control them. Pimples were popped, bras were purchased, periods were leaked. I bet around that time we can also remember our first catcall, our first experience being sexualized at school, the first time we felt that our bodies were in danger, sexually. I remember the first day of eight grade a male friend of mine came up to me and said, “damn, Hannah, your boobs got HUGE!” right in front of a group of other kids. Now, I did the only thing I could do in that moment, which was to punch him in the face, but I also remember feeling this odd combination of shame and strange satisfaction. I didn’t like having my body called out like that, but at the same time, my stock seemed to have gone up. Somehow I knew, innately, that my value to the world had something to do with my breast size.
As women we learn early that our bodies will be categorized, assessed, and given varying states of worthiness based on whatever arbitrary size and shape has been deemed “beautiful” for that period of time. We also learn over time just how powerful our bodies can be. After all, our feelings about our bodies have funded multi-billion-dollar industries for decades. There has been a ton of research on how body image in a patriarchal society is damaging to teenaged girls; how once young women begin so see their bodies as a commodity, it affects their mental health for the rest of their lives. Less commonly discussed, however, is the impact that body image and sexist body standards have on mothers. Many of those teenaged girls go on to have children, and the lessons we learn from society, from TV, social media, print media, our families, and almost every interaction we have, continue to shape how we relate to our bodies.
Objectification Theory tells us that when women are socialized to see their own bodies as a commodified thing, and when women are forced to constantly observe their bodies in order to feel safe and accepted, there can be severe consequences for them and how they move through the world, not to mention for their mental health. As mothers, our self-worth and mental health have a real impact on how we parent and how we relate to our children. And when we think of objectification, I can’t help but be reminded of having a big pregnant belly and feeling like I no longer had a face or an identity. People would touch me without asking. People who would say hello to my belly before saying hello to me. I felt like a cow who was producing the more important creature for the world; like a disembodied head floating above what really mattered. Or, as my mom put it, “you’re now just the lady upstairs.”
Mother’s bodies are policed now more than ever, though how they are policed depends on a number of factors, particularly race. Racism seeps into every aspect of life, and the judgment of women’s bodies is nowhere near exempt from this. The concept of thinness as being of higher value has a deep racist history that we cannot ignore. Our bodies are examined through all of the lenses society places on us. Chronic illness, varied abilities, gender identity and expression, all of these are deeply involved in how we are encouraged to relate to our bodies. When we become mothers, what our bodies are “supposed” to look like, and what they are “supposed” to be for change. If we cannot become mothers through pregnancy, our relationships with our bodies suffer from feelings of shame, as our society wrongly attaches so much of a woman’s value to her ability to procreate. If we become mothers through pregnancy and birth, our bodies also actually change, because surprise, surprise, creating a whole human and then expelling them from your body is actually kind of an intense process.
I have struggled with body image my whole life. No matter what weight I was at, I thought I was too fat. I thought that having any fat or roundness on my stomach was shameful. Ever since the first day that someone made a comment about the fat on my stomach, the obsession with forcing my body to fit into society’s expectations followed me. I have always been a feminist, but that didn’t save me from falling prey to diet culture. Over the years, I fell victim to so many diets, and so much shame. I bought into the idea that there was some “right” way for my body to be, and it was my own laziness and gluttony that was keeping me from it. So, when I got pregnant, in some ways it was freeing. No more sucking in my stomach; it was finally okay for a stomach to be round. But there was always to pressure to gain the “right amount” of weight. Not too much, not too little. Then, the minute my baby was born the pressure to lose the weight began. I had just had my midsection cut open, I was now a 24-hour milk bar, I didn’t get to sleep, and yet somehow, I felt ashamed that I hadn’t been able to also find time to diet and exercise. I was even told by my OBGYN that I should start thinking about losing weight at my first postpartum appointment. That is ridiculous when you think of it, but ask any mother you know and she’ll probably tell you she felt something similar.
If you become a mother through birth, your body becomes something other than what it was before. You see how powerful it is, what miracles it can achieve. You also feel what a toll those miracles have on you. Making people ain’t easy, and neither is keeping them alive. Even though I feel deeply grateful for having been able to carry and birth my children, and to have been able to breastfeed them, it was no walk in the park. Having your body become a vessel for life is physically and emotionally draining, and very few of us are given time or space to mourn or understand the changes we are experiencing. We aren’t given the tools to protect ourselves and know how to navigate these changes. Whether we give birth or not, as mothers our bodies are used and touched and drained, and yet we’re supposed to just keep going as if nothing has changed. We are expected to move gracefully from our bodies being for sexual consumption, to being only for the consumption of our children. But where, in all of this, is the truth that our bodies belong to us, and that our relationship with them is incredibly important?
Having a daughter made me think a lot about what I wanted her to feel about her body. We can know intellectually that these beauty standards are tools of oppression, but rewiring our brains to stop the impact this training has on us is no easy feat. Looking at my strong, perfect little daughter, though, I knew it was time to make a change. I thought about all of the pain I had felt, all of the time I had wasted hating myself, and it just killed me to think about her wasting even a moment feeling that way. I wanted her relationship with her body to be full of love and admiration. Maybe my own suffering should have been enough to make a change, but sadly it took the love I had for my girl to light the fire under my behind. I began to be purposeful for the first time in my life, not about changing my body so I would love her, but about loving my body for exactly what she was.
First, I had a conversation with everyone who would be around my daughter regularly (including myself) and asked that talk about diets, weight gain and loss, and anything having to do with setting unreasonable beauty standards be removed from conversation when around my daughter. I asked that people compliment her for things outside of her looks too, like her strength, her humor, her intelligence. Then, I continued to educate myself about where all of this shame comes from and how to combat it. (If you don’t follow Sonya Reneé Taylor/haven’t read her book, The Body is Not an Apology, start now.) I started to follow people on social media who are fighting against patriarchal beauty standards, and to fill my feeds with women of all shapes, sizes, interests, and colors. I began to notice and address the negative thoughts that popped up when I thought about my body.
The more I was purposeful about relating to and loving my body, the more I did. The more I told my inner body critic to shut up, the quieter it became. I started to stand in front of the mirror with my daughter and say “thank you” to different parts of our bodies. Thank you arm for being so strong. Thank you legs for carrying me all day. Thank you ears for listening to music. I started it to help her love her body, and through that I starting loving mine more. Seeing loving my body as a political act, as a protest against all of the forces that would want me to use it for shaming myself or putting myself above others, fueled the fire to keep the work going. The more I speak up when others are shaming themselves, the more empowered I feel to keep speaking up. When I think about women’s bodies now, I am amazed at all the ways that they are powerful, meaningful, and yes, beautiful in their own unique ways.
Mothers are responsible for a lot in this world. We are expected to raise a whole generation of humans, and many are expected to do it alone. On top of that we are expected to force our bodies to fit into a mold that only serves to contain us, to use our bodies as tools of shame and subservience. But here’s the thing, we have agency here. We can challenge ourselves and each other to stop this cycle one brave moment at a time. We can call out people, corporations, and systems that try to put us in our place. By standing up for our own bodies, we can inspire others in our lives to stand up for theirs. By loving and thanking our bodies, we can teach our children to do the same. We have to remind ourselves that we deserve to be loved and cherished for who we are, not for what we look like. But also, that what we look like is beautiful because of what we have been through, not in spite of it, it’s just that our definition of beauty has been warped and skewed. We have to value ourselves as we are, and then speak up when our value isn’t acknowledged. I’m not saying that its easy, because it isn’t. But I am saying that it’s worth it.
Here are some steps I suggest for beginning to work against body shame and toward body love:
Do your research. Read the books, articles, and blog posts that support your right to love and accept your own body.
Name your inner body critic and find ways to engage with it that feel healing.
Create affirmations of gratitude and appreciation for your own body.
Separate the idea of weight and health being the same thing. They are not.
Put a self-love practice into your daily routine. Say thank you to your body.
Find ways to move your body that feel empowering. Separate exercise from losing weight, because they are not the same thing.
Catch yourself and examine your thoughts when you think or say something demeaning about your body or someone else’s.
Speak up when someone is using body shaming language around you or your children.
Give yourself time and space and grace, because this isn’t easy!
If you need extra support, work with a coach!
Remember that you are worthy and valuable because you are who you are, point, blank, period.
This may be challenging work, but it’s work that you deserve. Your body has done a lot for you, and you have done a lot for it. For better or worse, you are one. Whatever relationship you’ve had in the past, there’s no day like today to start to make it better. I promise you it’s worth it.
