I have a confession to make. Every mom I know told me that during postpartum life, you can feel like a total stranger in your own skin. My confession? I didn’t think it would happen to me, and boy, was I wrong.
It didn’t happen in some poetic, soul-searching kind of way, but in a real, mirror-glancing, jeans-don’t-fit-right, “Who is this?” kind of way. And I was shocked, to say the least.
For me, the curveball came not during pregnancy, but after. I slipped back into my pre-baby jeans the week after giving birth. Seriously. My body just kind of snapped back . . . temporarily. People were saying things like, “Wow, you bounced back so fast!” and I even started to believe it. There I was, a new mom with a baby on my hip, and my old jeans zipped up, like some Pinterest version of postpartum.
But here’s the part no one claps for: the months that came next.
My body, without warning or permission, started gaining weight. Not a little. A lot. It was slow at first, and then all at once. I wasn’t bingeing. And I wasn’t “letting myself go.” I was breastfeeding. And I was exhausted. I was healing. I was doing everything I could, and yet I was gaining more weight than I ever had in my entire life.
Newsflash: breastfeeding doesn’t always make the baby weight fall off.
For some of us, it does the exact opposite. Hormones go rogue. Your body clings to every calorie like it’s prepping for an emergency. I was eating intuitively, moving when I could, and still, nothing made sense.
I remember standing in front of the mirror, pulling at my clothes, grabbing at parts of me I didn’t recognize. I’d think, “This isn’t what my body used to look like.” I wasn’t just trying to lose weight, I was trying to find me again.
And let’s not even talk about the mental weight. The shame. The frustration. The confusion. There’s this inner battle between loving what your body did, creating life, and mourning what it used to be.
Everyone talks about “bouncing back,” but no one tells you what it feels like when you don’t. Or when you do, and then suddenly don’t.
When your body pulls the rug out from under you, right when you thought you were getting it together. When the outside world praises how “well you’re doing,” but internally, you’re spiraling.
No one talks enough about the identity crisis that comes with this. The clothes that don’t fit. The old outfits that suddenly feel like they belong to someone else. The exhaustion of trying to “fix” something that maybe was never broken to begin with.
But here’s what I’m slowly starting to learn:
This body? This heavier, softer, stretch-marked, tired body?
She’s not broken. And she’s not failing. She’s becoming.
She’s the version of me that made it through. That woke up every two hours. That rocked a baby through endless nights. That kept showing up. Over and over again.
I may not love what I see every day, but I’m learning to offer her something better than love . . . grace.
So if you’re deep in postpartum and wondering what is going on with your body, this is your reminder: you’re not alone. You’re not lazy. And you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just in the thick of the part no one warned you about.
» » » » » RELATED READ: Matrescence: I Mourned My Old Life When I Became a Mom « « « « «
You can fit in your jeans one week and still not feel like yourself for a long, long time. And that’s okay.
Your worth isn’t tied to your waistline.
Your strength isn’t defined by your size.
And your postpartum journey isn’t supposed to look like anyone else’s.
Let’s stop romanticizing “bouncing back” and start honoring the real, messy, sacred transformation of becoming a mother.
You don’t have to love every inch of your body right now.
But you can learn to thank her.
Because the goal was never to go back . . . it was always to grow forward.
