The Body of Motherhood
Two quotes to start us off:
“Hating your body is like finding a person you despise and then choosing to spend the rest of your life with them while loathing every moment of the partnership.” -Sonya Renee Taylor in The Body Is Not An Apology
“Women, in capitalist development, have suffered a double process of mechanization. Besides being subjected to the discipline of work, paid and unpaid, in plantations, factories, and homes, they have been expropriated from their bodies and turned into sexual objects and breeding machines.” -Silvia Federici in Beyond The Periphery Of The Skin
Over the past few months, as we’ve been out more, as I’m seeing more advertisements for clothing, as I see more people showing their bodies, I have found myself heavily scrutinizing my very own body. Though this is something that I’ve dealt with in the past, I for the most part really love my body and haven't had these feelings in a long ass time.
What I’ve had to work through over the years to get to this point is seeing the beauty in the ways that my body has shifted (and continues to shift) since becoming a mother. I carry the imprints of growing and nurturing children in and with my body in so many different ways. In the way that my feet permanently expanded, in the way that my breasts hang, in the way that stretch marks hug my thighs, and in the way that the skin on my tummy ripples.
After carrying my twin sons to 38 weeks and delivering them vaginally I knew that my body was never going to be the same. I remember marveling at the ways my body expanded and grew to support them and I also remember the sadness that I felt looking at my stomach months after giving birth to them. I was 25 years old, a mother of 3 sons, and single. I remember the grief that I held in my gaze when looking at my body through the lens of perfection. Perfection given to me and shaped by the expectations of patriarchy and capitalist socialization which tell us how women's bodies should look in order to be desirable...especially after giving birth.
There was a feeling that I couldn't shake in my late 20’s and early 30s as I ventured through motherhood and that feeling was this: that my body would always tell on me. That my body would always scream that I’m someone’s mother and who would find that desirable? My body carries the physical archive of what it takes to bring life into this world and while that's a beautiful thing, I knew then what I also deeply know now...we don’t live in a society that relishes in or honors the body that motherhood makes. I’m speaking about the body created by growing and birthing a life and the body created by nurturing and raising a child inside of and under capitalism. A body that is altered, a body that is tired and over-extended from unpaid labor, a body that went through a portal.
The expectation is that women who become mothers are supposed to not look like we’re mothers. We’re not supposed to carry the archive of change to our bodies and in our psyches. Instead, we’re sold “snap back” dreams and fed an urgency to get back to “normal” even though the transformation of motherhood is anything but normal and there is no going back. Our bodies as mothers can become the location of so much turmoil and pain because of societal pressure and propaganda constantly pushed at us that says we shouldn’t admire this new iteration of our bodies and being but rather we should disdain and resent the changes.
It’s all a mind fuck.
But the good thing is that if we keep talking about it, if we keep pushing against the erasure, if we keep saying we refuse to participate in upholding these systems that say the body of the mother isn’t desirable if we change what it means to be “desirable,” if we keep doing the work then maybe...just maybe...future generations of mother’s will be liberated from the expectations of patriarchal and capitalist perfection and exploitation.