Body Image

Pregnancy messes on a major scale with an issue pretty much every girl I know has struggled with: body image. It’s bizarre to go from being flat-chested and thin to some burgeoning mother earth goddess. Like those old prehistoric figurines with the grotesquely large breasts and impossible hips. It’s weird to go from thinking about food occasionally to dreaming about it, waking up craving juicy steaks or fresh pancakes or flavors of ice cream you’d never even liked before.

Being pregnant the second time is like being pregnant the first time and the future times all at once. Now when I feel some way, I both think back on how it felt last time, and how it will feel again. There is a certain scope to my perspective that wasn’t there the first time around, when everything was new. Sometimes I feel I see the years stretching before me, with my chest fluctuating through the same three cup sizes and my body over the same thirty pounds, being skinny and stretched and flabby and skinny and stretched again. And while I know it is all passing, it is difficult to accept all this. To not be afraid that my body will never be the way it was again. To not be haunted by old fears from weight struggles in the past.

I really almost never think about aging, but this is probably what it feels like during that other period in your life when you realize your body is changing and it’s out of your control. What will it be like, say one day finding a clump of white hair or sagging breasts? To look down at my hands and find the skin paper-thin and wrinkled, the veins standing out? I feel funny even imagining my body that way. If I traveled forward in time and saw myself as an old person, it would probably scare the living daylights out of me.

But I see a lot of people in oculoplastics clinic at this point. People who are unmistakably aging but struggling to accept it; who want an operation to make their eyes look younger, who are unconsciously asking whether they look okay. Sometimes they ask me outright what I think. I’m supposed to say something neutral and professional, but I want to say, you look wonderful. Natural. Like you should.

I want to be able to say that to myself, ten years and who knows how many kids later. You look good. Wonderful. Just like you should. I think about the struggles I went through in my teens and early twenties and want to tell my younger self, you look beautiful. Some guy is going to really want you. Here is how to take care of your body for the right reasons and in a joyful way. Here is how not to isolate your struggles, or believe you can completely control how you appear.

I think about E, a chubby-thighed toddler who loves rubbing her round belly and running around naked, but who one day will be a girl and woman in a world where appearance means so much, and I think about what I want to say to her. I look at the natural delight she takes in the way her body moves and works and feels and wish she didn’t have to lose any of that.

So that’s what this body image thing feels like. There are days when I try to eat healthy, and others when I deliciously enjoy being the pregnant person eating a second helping of ice cream. I’m making it to a gym, for how good it feels to sweat, not really for any change it makes in how I look. And I watch my body change and swell and I know it won’t go right back to where it was. I think about my younger self, my future self, my daughter. And I think to myself, possibly, maybe, all this change is okay.