The plan: Effortlessly pop out baby, wait six weeks to recover on doctor’s orders, then hit the gym seven days a week, eat salads and vegetables, shoot a little Botox to the forehead, and go a little blonder. I’d be back in business, baby, in three months flat.
“Wait, you just had a baby?” people would ask in my pre-birth imagination. I would gloat, say the post-baby pounds just “fell off,” and skip off into the sunset in my size 27 jeans.
What actually happened: Last April, I gave birth to a baby girl who I love more than anything. But something else happened when she was born: She completely robbed me of my looks. Poof. Gone. Months went by, and 20 of the 30 pounds I'd gained weren’t coming off no matter how much I worked out or how many salads I ate. The weight, still there, only seemed to be redistributing itself — from my stomach to my neck, my boobs, my hips.
That was just the beginning. Within four months of giving birth, brown splotches appeared on my face, I got cellulite around my belly button, my c-section scar grew redder, and — most upsetting — more than half of my hair fell out. I sobbed in the shower watching blonde clumps wash down the drain. I'm popping so much Biotin and taking so many vitamins I actually had to Google if you could overdose on hair supplements. (No, but you can earn yourself a nice trip to the bathroom with an upset stomach.)
Wait, there’s more! My entire closet of clothes — all the designer jeans and silk shirts I've meticulously built up through the years — no longer fit. I've taken to wearing cheap yoga pants and sweatshirts on a daily basis.
I’ve cried over recent pictures of myself. Where did I go? I used to have people come up to me on the street to ask me out. Now? I’m invisible. I could pull off a caper and no one would be able to give a definitive description of me to the cops besides, “Fatish?Baldish?”
I know I’m in there somewhere; I haven’t given up just yet. But the vain part of me is wondering if I’ll ever be attractive to my husband — or anyone, including myself — ever again. Is any of this a normal way for a new mom to feel? Shouldn’t I be thinking only about the baby?
“I hear a lot of women describe their bodies as changing pretty radically after they give birth,” Olivia Bergeron, LCSW, counselor and founder of Mommy Groove Therapy & Parent Coaching in New York City tells me. “Celebrities give an unrealistic message of postpartum and what that looks like, and that feeds into this impression that we are somehow failing, but it’s highly unrealistic to get back that quickly.”
So, comparing myself to Hilaria Baldwin’s 11-day snap-back body on Instagram after baby number four is not healthy? No, says Bergeron. Instead, I should focus specifically on slow, regular self care. “Are you showering, getting out of your pajamas, and going outside every day?" she asks. "These are all small but significant ways to look and feel better. Many moms feel they have to martyr themselves in order to be good parents. But your child needs you to feel good.”
Water and no PJs for a start? I can totally do that. But what about my thinning scalp and husband’s imaginary affair? “The commonality here is fear,” Bergeron says. “Fear that you're not good enough, fear that you'll be abandoned. Intellectually, we mostly know these fears are unfounded, but it can be very hard to shake the sense of dread that accompanies them.” Now, every time one of these thoughts pops into my head, she challenges me to ask myself, Is this true, or just my perception?
Most important, she reminds me, is “be a good example for your daughter, and don’t demonstrate beating yourself up on how you look.”
In the meantime, I’ve found a store I plan on visiting, called Evereve, where in-house stylists are trained specifically to dress postpartum women and strollers fit in all the dressing rooms. The company’s CEO, Megan Tamte, founded the mom-friendly brand after she had her first baby and grew sick of “waiting” for her old self to come back. She still remembers the first time she went shopping with her newborn years ago and was completely lost. “I didn’t realize that I felt different about my body and wasn’t sure how I wanted to dress," she says. "The minute I started struggling with the stroller in the department store, my daughter started fussing. Then I wasn’t sure what sizes to grab. I got overwhelmed. I remember standing in the dressing room feeling lonely, needing help with something I hadn’t needed in the past.” She drove home brokenhearted and empty-handed. Then she vowed to open a store that catered to moms to save others the same humiliation.
Megan promises that getting out of the yoga pants now will help me rediscover who I am."Dress for who you are now and what your life looks like," she says. "Don't wait for your body to change to its original state to start getting dressed again. The sooner you start taking care of yourself, the sooner you'll feel like yourself.”
A few fresh pieces that fit my new bod would definitely give me a boost. And the next time I start telling myself I can’t possibly be attractive to anyone, I have to remember that what I have to offer isn’t all tied to my looks. Every morning, I hold my daughter up to the mirror, look her in the eyes, and repeat, “You’re so smart and kind and funny.” Maybe I should start telling myself the same.
Marianne Garvey is a former reporter and television host turned freelance editor and writer who covers pop culture, news, relationships, Real Housewives, parenting, food, and all things celebrity. Her work has appeared in The New York Post, Good Housekeeping, Glamour, Dow Jones, E! News, and Bravo, among others. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, their daughter Phoebe, and their cats Tiki and Meepers. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram.
