Fat Shaming should NOT be allowed.

03/07/2022

Fat shaming women after they’ve given birth should NOT be allowed. It takes an incredible amount of strength to accept that your body will change beyond your control and then to accept that your body will look pregnant for a while after giving birth as well.

More importantly, being a mother is hard. It is! I said it. Yes, it is a blessing to have the opportunity to carry and grow life inside you, and it is a miracle to hold your little one and to watch them grow every day. However, the one thing they don’t tell mothers-to-be about having a child is that all of the information you read or seek out in preparation for a little one does not fully prepare a mother for her child. There will always be certain things that are discovered after the birth of the baby. For instance, you can’t predict your child’s sleep habits or how they will latch when breastfeeding or what their temperament will be. In my situation, I found it particularly shocking that mothers have little to no adjustment time transitioning from being pregnant to then becoming the primary caregiver of a little human being.

I distinctly remember the nurse at the hospital handing me my baby and then periodically checking on me while I did skin-to-skin with my daughter. Then within a few hours time I was being discharged and sent home to care for her. All of the prenatal classes, and seminars and information I had so studiously consumed in the months leading up to giving birth seemed to all fall away and here I was beginning this new life stage with a little person who solely depended on me for everything. Talk about overwhelmed! New mothers have to navigate healing from child birth, whether it was vaginal or a caesarean then they have to adjust to a ‘no-sleep’ schedule balancing feeding, changing and nurturing their baby, maintaining important personal relationships with family and also somehow remembering to care for themselves.

After acknowledging all of these challenging transitions there is the pressure placed on women by society to ‘bounce back.’ What is the infamous ‘bounce back” about anyways? It is the idea that women should get back in shape after delivering their baby within a short time after giving birth. I’m calling it! The bounce back is ridiculous! Some women do naturally bounce back right away but for the ones that don’t they are no less deserving of praise. There are a lot of things happening in the life of a new mother, regardless of how many children you have, weight loss journeys are individual.

Would these ridiculous ‘bounce back’ expectations be so prevalent if they were expected of men, if men carried and delivered babies? Who can say. All I know is that we as a collective need to honour our bodies by celebrating what they have accomplished. We did an INCREDIBLE thing, and then we did another incredible thing: we took on the task of raising a little person. We mothers deserve medals and that hard truth is the only one that matters.

Written by – Eliza Mae

Photo by Laura Tancredi from Pexels