I don’t know how you felt after you delivered your child, but I was – quite frankly – messed up. And I don’t mean just physically. I think when my first child was yanked out of me by something akin to BBQ tongs, my perineum wasn’t the only thing to shatter into pieces.
I had no idea at the time of course. I thought everything was “fine”! My only thoughts were:
1) keep the baby alive
2) keep the husband at bay
3) make sure everything appears totally normal
I don’t think ‘I’ was anywhere on the Agenda. And three years later after the second child, a house renovation and a return to work – ‘I’ was still no where to be seen. Somehow, ‘I’ had completely disappeared. When my husband suggested I do something for me, I looked at him like he’d suggested I get a Brazilian. What? So, when I did finally get my act together to have a night out, what did I do? I went scrapbooking. How sad is that! ‘Something for me’ meant sitting at my dining room table organizing photos of my kids.
In hindsight, it makes sense. When I frantically tried to push out that first kid of mine, I also pushed out part of me. Big chunks of me ended up on the floor with the placenta and all the other goo from the delivery, only to be mopped up and incinerated with the rest of the hospital waste.
Maybe that’s why moms are so focused on getting back their bodies – maybe “going to the gym” is more about picking up the bits and pieces of ourselves off the hospital floor and slowly putting ourselves back together.
And now I get what mommy sites like www.yummymummyclub.ca are all about – helping moms find some semblance of their old selves – a wee smidgen of their former self-esteem so that overtired, stressed out, feeling-as-sexy-as-a-log moms actually brush their teeth in the morning or put on jeans instead of the same old stretchy maternity pants.
Who knows, maybe us mom are genetically coded to put ourselves on hold for a few years. But what I do know is if your sense of self is a tad on the shaky side before you have a baby, whoa Nelly look out, you’re in for quite a ride when that little critter pops out!
- Andrea
Tags: motherhood, self esteem, yummymummy