I’m Too Sexy

I have been officially postpartum for exactly 4 months. I’m back down to my pre-pregnancy weight, and have been for some time, although the same number of pounds are being worn in different locations: my butt and stomach are a little smaller but my thighs and boobs are a little bigger, not to mention my fingers (I still can’t get my wedding ring on and off without lubing up). I’m back into all the pre-pregnancy clothes that I’ll probably ever manage to get back into, and I had a purifying, cathartic, ruthless cleanup of my closet a few weeks ago. Several pairs of pants and skirts had to go because my hips are bigger and that ain’t never gonna change. But I had clothes in there from high school, high school, from which I graduated ten years ago. I had clothes from college and from the semester I spent in Wales and went nuts buying European (read: slutty) fashions. Into the Goodwill bag went the tight shirt with “I will not tease the boys” written over and over in glitter and the even tighter red pants I wore clubbing in Europe, which made me feel oh-so-sexy at the time, but which now displayed just a hint of camel toe. (I kept the black shirt with the completely see-through back with a starburst pattern of glitter that I typically wore with those pants, not because I ever expect to wear it again, but because I couldn’t bring myself to toss it. We need relics in our life, memorials to times we’ll never re-live, so that from time to time we’ll come to the back of our closet and brush our fingertips against that cheap polyester and fall headlong into an ocean of memories of nights of freedom, stupidity, immaturity, too much booze, fantastic friendships, and one hell of a lot of fun.) Being pregnant taught me that I can survive on about a dozen shirts, two pairs of pants, and one pair of shoes. I wanted to purge my closet. I wanted to be able to actually see what clothes I own instead of having them all jammed in so tightly that I couldn’t look at any of them, much less wrestle a particular shirt out without bringing three or four others with it.

Do you know how bad my clothing situation had gotten? I’ll tell you. It was so bad that I threw away 30, count ‘em 30, pairs of panty hose. I don’t wear panty hose for work. I have never worn panty hose for work. The only time I ever wear panty hose is for an interview, of which I’ve had three in my life, the most recent one in 2007. There is absolutely no reason for me to have ever owned that many pairs of hose. I tossed 30, but I kept at least a dozen. And that pretty much sums up my closet and dresser situation. By the time I finished I’d filled four trashbags, pitched well over a dozen pairs of shoes, and emptied so many hangers that I actually threw away a bunch of them because I deemed we didn’t have the room to keep so many empty hangers lying around. So now I can not only fit back into my pre-pregnancy clothes but I can actually access them to put them on.

I hadn’t spent much time looking at my naked body since my son was born, primarily because I was too busy taking care of an infant to ever have time to look at myself. But over Christmas we visited my in-laws. I took a shower and when I got out and was toweling off, I looked up and suddenly saw my naked body in my mother-in-law’s enormous, perfectly spotless mirror, with perfect Hollywood dressing room lights over it. Every detail of my post-baby body was on full display. I froze and just stared.

My breasts were enormous and heavy with milk, resting low on my chest. They were crisscrossed with a complex network of deep blue veins, much darker and much larger than they had ever seemed before, all heading to the areolae, which had previously been smooth and very light pink, barely distinguishable from the rest of my breast, but were now larger, bumpy, and much darker. My nipples – deemed “flat” by the lactation consultants in the hospital – were certainly flat and smooth no more, but instead looked like perfect, succulent red berries. New stretch marks, much deeper than the ones I’d gotten in puberty, were clearly visible all around the outer part of my breasts, making the faded ones from my teenage years seem barely noticeable. My stomach, although back to its previous size, was, well, squishy. It was back to its normal size but there were no abdominal muscles left under it, so it was just jelly-like and wobbly. When I laid down I could put a hand on either side of it and shake it back and forth just exactly like a bowl full of jelly. All that extra skin sagged down into an upside-down heart ending just above my panty line, and right in the middle was my stretched-out and oddly dark belly button, along with the disturbingly stretched-out and even darker hole where my belly button ring had been. An unbelievable number of stretchmarks covered my entire stomach and continued down my inner thighs all the way to my knees. All that extra skin and all those stretch marks combined to make for an awfully wrinkly stomach. A series of wide, deep, painfully red stretchmarks lined my hips, stretching all the way to my back, and looking exactly like I’d been clawed by some vicious animal. My butt, always one of my good features, had lost weight and become too flat to be of much note, and my thighs, always one of my sensitive problem areas, had gotten even bigger. There was nothing whatsoever to feel sexy about, to find beautiful, to want to have admired by others. My body was permanently altered, aged, scarred. My skin would forever be mottled with dark patches and the uneven fading of stretch marks,  and it would never be smooth again.

So why is it that in the last few weeks I’ve felt sexier than I ever have before? I feel more at ease in my own skin – with all its wrinkles, and stretch marks, and dark patches – and more at home in my own body than I ever have in my life. I feel more connected to my body, though I never felt disconnected from it before. My body and psyche feel like two parts of a whole, rather than separate entities that happen to be going around together, or rather, my body feels like a crucial part of Me, of my identity, whereas in the past it was just what I happened to have and so I made the best of it.

My body and I have both been permanently changed by the birth of my son. His gestation and birth are experiences that we – my body and I – share, and that bind us in a way that, oddly, we weren’t before. My body created this beautiful, wonderful, frustrating, maddening, breathtaking creature, nourished him, allowed him to grow into a being that can survive in this world on his own, and we worked together to birth him, through nearly a day of unmedicated labor and more than an hour of pushing until finally he emerged, took his first independent breaths, and was cut permanently from my body’s life support. How could I fail to love and cherish that which gave life to my son? How could I fail to forgive my body’s new flaws, knowing what treasure they bought? How could I feel anything but sexy and confident, knowing what power my body holds?

In the last four months I’ve had only two chances to get dressed up and look my best, to go out with my husband wearing an outfit especially selected to entice him to watch me walk and move. There have been only two times when I’ve had any real reason to look myself over in a mirror and size myself up and admire what I see. Yet I have spent hours looking at my body. There is a full-length mirror in my son’s bedroom and when I’m dancing him to sleep, holding him to me, my cheek pressed against his head, I’ll catch sight of us together in that mirror and I’ll just stare. Sometimes I’ll have gotten up so hastily from nursing him that my shirt will still be lifted halfway up my body, my sagging stomach hanging out and falling slightly over my waistline. I rarely take the time to shower and do my hair if I’m not going anywhere, so my hair is frequently in disarray. I never wear makeup unless going some place where I’ll see people I actually know. I often spend the entire day in pajamas or sweatpants and fuzzy slippers. And so I’ll watch myself dancing my son to sleep, hair sticking up at odd angles, no makeup, sweat pants, a T-shirt pulled halfway up so my stomach is lopping over my waistband, deep, red stretch marks visible even with only the glow of the nightlight. And I’ll love what I see. Sure it’s not an image that’s going to have the men lining up to get my phone number, but it’s so … right. My body was made to bear children. I was made to be a mother. It’s as if, for the first time, my body and what I have always called “me” are working together, are part of a greater whole. My body is no longer merely the vessel I happened to come into through chance genetics and lifestyle. It is part of Me and it’s a part I revel in.

Yesterday evening I was lying in bed running my hands over the new texture of my stomach, and I squeezed the sides of my stomach, pushing all the extra skin and fat in toward the middle, pushing it up, and do you know what it reminded me of? It looked just exactly like a lava cake. My stomach was the cake and my belly button was in the middle, where the chocolate syrup would pool up, and stretch marks flowed from the center down the sides like streams of chocolate syrup. Sure, not the sexiest thing ever, but who doesn’t like a good lava cake from time to time?

What is sexiness, after all, other than a somewhat arbitrary cultural construct? When I started to develop breasts, my mother’s were the only ones I’d ever seen, and so I wondered when mine would become “long,” because I thought that was the desirable way for them to be. So perhaps it is not so surprising that I’m more comfortable now with all my sagging and squishiness and stretch marks than I ever was with my youthful smoothness and perkiness. Youth is fleeting after all, so there’s not much good in becoming too attached to the treasures of a youthful body, but motherhood is forever, and I’ll take all the scars it dishes me for the smile my son gives me when he sees me in the morning and for the look in his eyes when he’s figuring out something new about the world and for the contented noises he makes when I nurse him at my breast, and for all the memories I have of my body’s effort to give him life and bring him into our world.

I’m too sexy for my youth.