Getting your body back. Pre-pregnancy jeans. Getting your groove back.
These messages are everywhere. Magazines have turned celebrity pregnancy into a show of how much weight is gained and a contest of how fast you can lose the pregnancy weight and get back to how you were.
It is a tremendous disservice to reduce the magnanimity of what it means to become a mother, in all its everyday non-glamour of non-stop breastfeeding, irregular schedules, no sleep, and unpredictable moods together with the moments of radiant love and pure connection to numbers on a scale.
The thing is THERE IS NO GOING BACK. And that is not just your body.
We will never be the same again after bringing a new life into the world. Our body, brain and nervous system rewired and reconfigured to track the smallest of sounds, to perceive the slightest of threats, to protect with utmost propriety. Our psyche also has just crossed a threshold- we have been to the edge between worlds. We came up against out perceived limits of what was possible and then have to digest how it is we transgressed the borderland.
The shapeshifting into the new you who is mother does, yes, involve loss of who you were. Other treasures await you.
May you find a sense of strength and propriety that emerges not from how you look or what you can do, but from who you actually are.
