What I Learned From Seeing Other Women Naked

My post-birth body was even more disappointing than the twenty-year-old body I had spent years trying to command into a more desirable shape. A lifetime of internalizing ads filled with half naked women that were a fraction of my size and airbrushed into smooth idols of value and worth failed to nurture a healthy attitude towards my own perceived shortcomings. Staring into a mirror only proved that I was too short, too lumpy, too weak, and never enough.

I toiled to reclaim my never-enough-but-better-than-now body after giving birth to my first child, a nine-pound, four-ounce boy with a head the size of Jupiter. Over the course of nine months I had transformed into a squishy blob of emotions and I longed for that pre-baby, subpar body, and not only for its shape and robustness, but for its innate ability to retain a range of body fluids – breastmilk, urine, and beyond – without ever questioning that an alternative functionality was possible. There was no going back after birth; my body would be even less adequate from this day forward.

I’ve been blessed with a group of mama friends that, like me, are all questioning this female tendency towards body-dissatisfaction. How many days, hours, and resources (not to mention, negative energy) have we all wasted on telling our strong and competent bodies that they weren’t satisfactory? I’m not sure how it came about, but this group of ladies unleashed some vulnerability one evening when we each started exposing our darkest, most embarrassing secrets – breasts that are too droopy, C-section scars that are too rigid, horrifying muffin tops, unwieldy bikini lines, shoulders that are too broad, legs without a thigh gap, chin hairs, stretch marks, gray hair, and beyond.

We were exposing parts that were “subpar” or “damaged”, yet I found myself looking at bodies that weren’t as the descriptor portrayed. The range of shapes, sizes, colors, and stories proved that natural beauty existed not only at the surface, but also in the core of each of these unique and courageous mothers. I saw the mom whose darkened scar saved two lives in an emergency C-section, the mother whose strong arms raised a toddler while her husband worked in a different state, the mom whose eyes are often tired as she gazes upon her three wild and sleepless boys. I was looking at profoundly capable and beautiful women who were unable to see their own physical worth through all of society’s unrealistic standards.

What became strikingly clear during the exposé was that many of us don’t actually know what a normal female body is supposed to look like, especially after having given birth. We’ve been inundated with far too many images of perfection that boast the latest tools, programs, and techniques, all aimed at achieving physical greatness. Our measure of a healthy mom bod is quite specific and skewed, and if you boast something different than this template it’s most often kept hidden away from scrutiny.  

Pregnancy has a way of redistributing skin, fat, and even bones, and parenting responsibilities have a way of redistributing time that was once spent caring for ourselves. Combine our unrealistic physical expectations with decades of being bombarded with advertising, and you’re left with an epidemic of women with a lack of understanding of what it means to be healthy. We’ve placed the trendiest body shape onto a pedestal and found ourselves constantly longing for the appropriate tools to free us from the fatness, the misshapenness, the marks, and the scars. But until that day, we’ll wear our one-piece bathing suits, wrapped in a towel, as to fulfill our obligation to spare the masses from seeing anything that might be mistaken as “less than”.

I’m not sure if it’s wisdom, courage, or an intensifying desire to give a few less shits about things that don’t really matter, but I’m starting to love this imperfect body just a little bit more as it grows older despite it becoming “less beautiful” by media’s false standard. I’m smarter than I used to be in that I now know that images of perfection don’t serve me well and I strive to shut these images out and start seeing women for what they are: unique, powerful (and sometimes wonderfully misshapen) bodies that are capable of miraculous feats.

I love that marketers are starting to catch on to the fact that women are fed up with the idea that we’re supposed to look a certain way and fit into a particular mold. Swim suit ads exposing cellulite, stretch marks, and God forbid, a muffin top, provide me with a better visual of how my imperfect body might display their clothing and certainly makes me feel a lot more confident when the fit is more similar. I can only hope for the sake of my daughter and all of the other young women out there that this trend continues.

The greatest benefit I see to bringing some awareness and normalization around female body shape is that it allows for a greater focus on what it means to be truly healthy. When we stop focusing on our appearance, we can instead use that energy to focus on how we feel. And when we focus on how we feel, we start to hear messages from our body that will lead us down a path to more energy and improved self-confidence. Extreme weight loss doesn’t always equate to a happy, healthy body and these are the basic myths that we need to start challenging.

We all deserve the right to feel attractive in our own skin. But I also think that we need to readjust our definition of what it means to be beautiful. We’re all different, and I think it’s time we started celebrating those differences rather than letting them get in the way of living our most fulfilled and beautiful lives.