Learning to Love Your Post-Pregnancy Body

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I'm not sure anything I write on this subject will be coherent or come to any type of conclusion. I don't really feel that I have any advice for learning to love your post-pregnancy body because I'm learning that process myself.

I've had two babies in two years. I suppose I put my body through a lot in a short amount of time, but most women have multiple babies within a short span of years. I believe our bodies are definitely built to do it. Still, it's a lot of quick and sudden changes that you're left to deal with. People may gain weight slowly over the years, but that's different. With pregnancy, it's like this crazy roller coaster of body changes overnight and in the morning you wake up with an entirely different body.

The body that you've looked at so many times in the mirror before stepping into the shower is like a foreign person to you all of the sudden. You don't feel like you're in your own body anymore. It's really quite shocking for a lot of women, I assume. It was and is for me, at least.

People tease me because I'm slim and say that I have no reason to complain, but it's still not my "original" body. It's not what I was working with before, that's for sure!

I feel like not only have I gone through a postpartum body change, but I entered my thirties this year and I felt like I was dealing with a lot of turbulence and adjustment, mostly mental. I felt like since I didn't look like my twenty year old self, I was therefore deemed unattractive and like my heyday was over! But hello, have you seen women in their thirties and fourties? Jessica Biel, Christina Hendricks, Halle Berry, Elizabeth Banks, Eva Mendes, Jennifer Lopez....I think most of them look better than they did in their twenties. They look more sexy. More womanly.

My completely off topic point being that we don't have to remain an image of what we were in order to feel or look or be attractive. Yeah, I may have had a firmer body when I was 20, but I also had zero idea of who I was or what I was doing, nor did I have much confidence. Great boobs are truly squandered on the young! Now that I'm 30, I just feel like I know so much more about myself and what makes me happy. I'm proud of who and what I am, rather than feeling like I need to change anything. And that alone makes a woman more attractive!

Conclusion being: I'm learning to love my post-pregnancy body. It's not what I had before but that doesn't have to be a bad thing unless I make it that way. I can dwell upon how much I hate it or upon how amazing it is. And what it's given me. I don't know...I'm still getting to know this body, but I'm learning to love and appreciate it more and more every day.