J ’adore my bump!
You know what I really do… yes, I at this point, I feel as though I’m perpetually carrying a moving boulder that likes to poke my bladder around with me all day, my back hurts all the time, I waddle instead of walking, I feel like my skin is stretched to capacity and I’m getting plenty of painful Braxton hicks.
But for all the aches and pains, I love it and I know in a few short weeks I’m going to miss it. So here it is….
My bump, in all it’s imperfect, yet perfect glory.
‘How is it perfect’ you might ask? Well to you it might look unsightly, with its tattooing of purple stretch marks on top of my old silvery ones. My flabby, sad looking belly button that’s gone huge, lost its elasticity and turned inside out. My spots, my uneven skin tone, my hairs and my scars left behind by the PUPPP rash from my first pregnancy. But to me, this belly is perfect.
It’s already created and grown a little life who’s now running around the world like a super charged energiser bunny. I still cannot believe my little charger with the blue eyes of an angel (yes he can switch from angel to anti-Christ in 0.666 seconds!) came from my body!
Under its own volition, my belly swelled and contracted and did everything required of it to sustain a life. Along the way, it lost its elasticity, it’s been left scarred and changed and now once again it’s managed to grow and sustain a second little life in in there all by itself.
I don’t know if filtering pictures of bumps is a thing… I know I’ve seen plenty of bumps that look smooth, soft and flawless. Perhaps those women just have good genes? Or maybe they felt under real pressure to filter images of their bumps… and if so I think that’s a damning indictment of how society can make pregnant women feel in terms of their bodies.
Filtering my bump is something I’d just never do, because personally I love every mark, every scar, and every uneven bit of skin.
As clichéd as it sounds, these really are my battle scars. I absolutely earned every single one of these stripes and I’ll be damned if I filter then for anyone.
I look at them and they remind me that once (and now luckily twice!) my body did something amazing… They tell the story of my own transformation into a mother. It’s a microcosm of that journey. It was painful at times, it was change I wasn’t really ready for, it was overwhelming, and it was something I had little control over. It left me with many deep scars I still carry and will never leave me, but in time I learned to heal and embrace the marks left behind by that transformation, until they just became part of my new identity.
If I could get one message across to mums who feel in some way sad or ashamed by their new bodies I’d say this… be proud of your bump, learn to love your post baby body and don’t feel you have to edit or change it for anyone. Changing your body should be something you do because YOU want to, nothing else.