7 Ways to Love Your Mama Body
Helpful thoughts for postpartum mothers.
I’m going to borrow from the Day of Love and use it as inspiration to pay tribute to every mama and her body.
These tips go out to all the new and expectant mothers out there — I’m sure the seasoned ones have already let motherhood teach them all these approaches to loving and appreciating their bodies! Those busy caring for newborns may need reminding how well we can love ourselves too.
Step 1. Get into the shower and run your hands over your postpartum tummy, which looks somewhere between sixteen to twenty weeks pregnant still, despite the baby having left the premises. Say, thank you, belly. You held together a little life while it was the size of a poppy seed, nourished it until that heartbeat blossomed into a darling dumpling with ten fingers, ten toes, the thickest eyelashes, and a voice like a melody to your ears. What a fantastic thing your body has done, stretching and making way for your little one. Your midsection has deserved all the belly butter you’ve slathered on it all those months.
Step 2. Take a moment to examine your ever-changing breasts. They have expanded and produced colostrum in the first days around the moment of birth. Milk is coming in that will nourish your little love — one dependent on you during these early weeks and months. What a magnificent miracle your breast milk is. It can ward off sickness and boost a baby’s immune system. It is the sustenance that keeps your bubba growing and going. And even if you have breastfeeding issues or need to feed your baby formula, celebrate your boobs anyway, your baby’s favorite pillows.
Step 3. Cherish those secret parts of you that have torn and stretched in order to make way for this new life and say thank you. Your body has been stared at by several members of staff under bright lights. Slicing, vacuuming, stitches may have been involved. Soon, when you have healed, you can go back to enjoying your privacy. No more getting looked at by strangers in scrubs. In cases of C-section, thank your belly for getting ready to repair itself after going under the knife. It let this life out. What a resilient body you have.
Step 4. Amaze at your uterus, whose muscles remain relatively dormant throughout your life (apart from those who may experience extreme cases of dysmenorrhea). Then these tissues do their big production number when the baby is ready to arrive, stepping in during birth to show off how powerful they are. You pushed an entire life into this world. From the size of a pear to a pumpkin and back again, what a mighty network of muscles resides in you.
Step 5. Pat yourself on the back for those nine months of passing on your oxygen to your baby first, at times leaving you feeling light-headed and faint. Extra volumes of blood were coursing through your veins then, quarts of added weight for you to lift, pouring out of you at birth.
Step 6. Appreciate your pelvic floor that withstood a lot of pressure during that time you carried your little one inside you. It did so much work to hold everything together. Now you can lend these muscles some love and exercise them back to renewed strength.
Step 7. Tell your body she can take the time she needs to repair and regain her stability. You may be bruised and battered after birth and can barely walk to the pharmacy a week or so after, but your body has shown you what wonders she can do.
Imagine, you held a child inside you, nourished a heartbeat, and are now feeding a new baby from the breast.
Perhaps your body fills you with a sense of awe, stretching and tearing to allow life to slip through. You will never be the same, the marks of new life arriving through you there forever.
It is as if you see your body for the first time for the phenomenon she is.
You have done an incredible thing, mama! May you get to lend your body some love today.
