Why Has Adjusting To My Post-Baby Body Been Harder The Second Time Around?

A lot is made of the pregnant body.

Hell, there’s an understatement. From Maggie Nelson’s pregnancy being literally saluted in an airport by serving military personnel in The Argonauts, to the comic horror of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Junior, the iconic pose of Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair to the simple, prosaic act of balancing a sausage roll on your bump, we are transfixed, revolted, overwhelmed and otherwise provoked by the temporary largeness and hardness of gestating bodies.

But what about the postpartum body? What about my postpartum body? How am I supposed to travel across this new landscape of my skin? The sinking mudflat of my stomach, the pendulous lava flow of my breasts, the foothills of my new large thighs or the sand dune shifting of my chin? Oh, I know what I’m supposed to say: I’m supposed to say that I celebrate my softness. I am expected to cry loudly and confidently about the miracle my body has just performed; to talk about how I take strength from the incredible thing it did; to pay homage and gratitude for the new life, family and future it has delivered me.

Which is all well and good, until you’re standing naked on your bedroom carpet, and somehow every leaking corner, every enveloped edge, every thickened limb does not feel like yourself. I am not thinking of this body as “good” or “bad” but I am thinking of it, I’m afraid, as “other”. Other to me, other to how I move and live and occupy physical space. In this moment, looking down at my recently revealed toes, I don’t know myself.

Obviously, Western capitalism has an answer: for about £20,000 I could book myself in for a so-called “Mummy Makeover” right now, here, in London. It could include breast augmentation, an abdominoplasty (tummy tuck), liposuction, a thigh lift, brachioplasty (an arm lift) and labia minora reduction. That’s right; I could employ a private surgeon to reconfigure my body from the vulva outwards. According to at least one website, I’d be able to have sex four weeks afterwards, wear a bra after six weeks and even have a shower the next day, in hospital. But I can tell you right now, I don’t think any of that would make this body feel like my body again. If anything, it would alienate me further from my physical existence, only now I’d have new scars and no money to do up my kitchen at the end of it.