Recently one of my beloved g-bloggers brought up how she is going through changes in her body image/self-image post-baby and I didn’t comment at the time because I had too many thoughts to be able to make sense of them at the time. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then though and I think I am more able to be coherent.
(Nope, not sure I was more coherent. WAY long-winded and rambly. Ah well. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. 🙂

How much of how we react to our bodies is decided by society and how much is decided by our own feelings? When people ask me how I am feeling my quickest response is, “Fat.” Of course people get all condescending and tell me, “You aren’t fat, you are pregnant!” enh. Whatever. What is interesting to me is that thinking of myself as fat at this point is ironic because I’m still more than 20 lbs below my maximum weight ever. Given that I only have 16 more weeks to go, I may never hit my maximum while pregnant. So calling how I feel now “fat” is probably incorrect, what would be more correct is to say that I feel ungainly and disconnected from my body reactions. That is hard to say succinctly though and harder to communicate clearly in a random short conversation. Fat is something that people get. Fat is used to mean “My body is bigger than I want it to be/feel it should be.” But why? I go back and forth because I’m aware that Americans are heavier than any other country in the world, so maybe we all should think we are fat. But then again… so what? Of course we are heavier than people who are starving in other countries. When people from those countries come here they get heavier too. It isn’t as if we are magically different, we live in a land of plenty the likes of which the rest of the world doesn’t get to experience. Why should I feel guilty about this?

Then we get to standards of beauty. If I look at magazines I see women who weigh 80 pounds less than me and I’m told *those* are the beautiful women. But when I look at them my first response is normally, “Ugh. You’ve got to be kidding me. You find *that* attractive?!” Baby, I want some hips and breasts and a belly that will feel good to snuggle against. If I’m going to risk getting my eye poked out by your ribs you really need to have a fan-fucking-tastic personality. I’m not actually trying to skinny bash, though I know it might sound that way. If that is how your body works then I am not likely to say one word about you being too skinny. I know very thin women who are beautiful and adorable and fabulous. But I feel that there is a material difference between women who are naturally thin and who have messloads of energy and who eat and enjoy life and that is just how they look and the women who are starving themselves for an ideal. The beautiful naturally thin women I know tend to not look haggard. They are bright and vivacious. They tend to freak me out a little because they have so much energy. 🙂 That is *not* how the supermodels look. They are lethargic and drained and look unhealthy. They are simply not attractive to my eye. But I’m told I should do that to myself? No no no.

So what is healthy and positive then? Well, I have beloved friends who are part of the fat-acceptance movement. That is the other end of the spectrum. In many ways I see the benefit in this end of the spectrum but I’m enough of a realist (and a Libertarian worried about rising health care costs) to be nervous about this end of the spectrum as well. I’m not stupid enough to blame all health problems on weight once someone is heavy, but I think that weight can complicate things. I know that when I was at the heaviest I have been I felt pretty terrible most of the time. My body didn’t want to function the way I wanted it to. So I can’t fully jump on board to just love my body no matter what. That hasn’t lead to good things for me. I do need to watch my weight to some degree.

Then we get to how pregnancy and kidlets are going to change my body. All of a sudden all of the hard-earned knowledge I have about my body is going to change drastically, forever. Well, or at least for a long time. My heavy mesomorphic body doesn’t like to stay on the smaller side, but with lots of effort I can manage it. How is that going to work with kids? How am I going to feel about myself if I don’t slim down post-baby? I have guesses, but that is all I have from this side of the having-a-baby experience. If I get off my ass and get active again so that my body feels healthy faster I’m willing to bet that I won’t mind too much if I stay pudgy, I mean… is it really any different from how I am a lot of the time? 🙂 I worry more about getting back my flexibility. I worry more about finding ways to exercise that will include kids and model healthy behavior. I’m not so great at maintaining an exercise regime in general. I feel so much better when I do that I try to talk myself into it… I just usually fail.

So overall I’m sort of at an ok place with looking at societal programming and my body image. I say I’m fat but I’m using the word poorly and I should be more precise in my language. That’s an easy thing to work on about myself. Then we get to how sex plays in with all of this. I think that sex plays a bigger part in my self image than how I actually look. I acknowledge that this is kind of odd. My previous maximum weight was reached after a year long free-fall after finding out about the HPV. Things with Tom got hard in the sex department, then the M/s fell apart, so oh baby did food become my sole comfort. I don’t blame Tom for this, the whole situation was bloody hard all the way around and my coping mechanisms were not sufficient for the task. It’s interesting to realize that all of that started six years ago. Wow, I’ve changed.

So as sex with Tom became less consistent than it had been and became more difficult in general due to my physical issues I grew to see the issues as all my fault and I somewhat consciously stopped giving a shit about my body in general. I didn’t want to be attractive at all anymore because it felt like a lie–my bits weren’t working so I should be ugly. (I don’t *really* associate being heavy with being ugly, but people are weird.) Once I hit a point where I knew that I hated what I was I started losing weight and trying desperately to get my sexuality back. It only kind of worked because my ability to relate to Tom was so damaged by going through the free-fall. We just didn’t know how to work through it together. I’m still sad about that. I know it hurt him. When I got to the point of near-desperation because I needed to have my sexuality back in a way that would let me keep building my self-image I told him we needed to try poly. Let me humbly say thank you A for being willing to be the one who started that process. You rock. 🙂 You gave me the footing to get started finding that part of me again and I will be eternally grateful–and you are a good friend. I so win.

So what is my point? I’m seriously babbling. I think my point is that I am more scared of how my sexuality will change after kids than how my body will change. I’m afraid that I am going to pull away from my wonderful Noah and hurt this relationship because I don’t know how to move through losing my sexuality for a time. I’m afraid of the damage to my self-image and how that will affect my ability to exercise and gain comfort in my body again. On one hand I am pretty damn confident that I have grown a lot in the past six years and I have moved through hard situation after hard situation and I *can* get through this. I’m scared that I will wuss out though. For me, at this point, the hardest thing about getting through trauma is not letting myself wuss out. I want to. I want to hide in my bed under the covers. But that never got me anywhere and I do have the coping skills at this point to be able to handle just about any trauma. I just need to do it.

Which brings me to the current sex issues. Sex has changed so much during pregnancy from the most intense oh-my-god my kneecaps just melted orgasms I’ve ever had to wanting desperately to be turned on and… nothing happens. I’m not trying very hard to really spend the time on how to figure this situation out. I need to. I need to for me. I need to for Noah. I need to so that we don’t go into the first few weeks of no-sex-after-labor period already frustrated and disconnected. It’s not really ok for me to be ignoring this. And Lord knows Noah is willing to experiment. HA. Best Sex Partner EVER. 🙂 Maybe our Sunday when I told the realtor we need a day in the house by ourselves we should drag out all the fun stuff we can find. That would be a good Sunday. I know how to do this. Now I need to do it. Confidence. I can do this.

Ok. So do it.