A Love Letter to My Post Baby-Body

Pregnancy — there were too many words and then, too few. My language, desires, passions, along with my energy, were swallowed into a growing chasm of possibility — a darkness bathed in the light of a dozen competing ambitions, of what ifs and maybes, a growing lump of futures and pasts, a million different stories with a million different endings, written in the flesh of my expanding body.

I had been an athlete, riddled with muscles and scars. I had been too hard for the possibilities of my child and our future, and so, my body shifted and pressed outward until those hard places collapsed into jelly. I became soft and pliable. Every inch of me shifted, like water, and my skin bubbled out into radiant balloons and clouds, dreaming just beyond the horizon of my son, his future, our family, our future — my story told in the third person, by me but for someone else.

Despite my obsession with my body, with its strength and its utility, pregnancy was the first time that I realized that my body, built by and for me, was not solely mine. It was of me, but it did not belong only to me.

I was a walking, talking duality: simultaneously strong, then weak, empowered and powerless. My world moved forward with and because of me…and regardless of me and what I thought I wanted, nature would take over, and I would take a back seat.