A Weighty Issue
This is a rather long post, I’m sorry.
I’m scared of being pregnant. I’m more than halfway through now, but the whole idea of it still freaks me out.
Partly it’s because I watched Sigourney Weaver in ‘Alien’ at a very young and impressionable age, but a lot of it goes much deeper than that.
I’m scared of my body – it’s doing something that I have no control over; it’s changing and growing, and it’s really quite remarkable from an objective, rational point of view.
BUT… as a teenager I was very overweight and I consciously developed an eating disorder to control this. I lost a lot of weight in a relatively short span of time and achieved my dream of going to dance college, then training and working as a dancer. Obviously, in that industry, there is *so* much emphasis placed on appearance, and beauty (and therefore bookability) is directly tied to a bodily aesthetic. I never really fit that mould anyway, and occasionally lost jobs because a male booker/manager/promoter outright said that I was too fat for “their” stage. Even into my late twenties this affected my mental health, my self-esteem, and, therefore, the worth I placed on my own body – it was only worth what it looked like, not what it felt like, or what it could do. Outward appearance was the way I earned a living, and thus I had to conform to the (literally) narrow aesthetic of a mainstream ideal of what was considered to be beautiful and bookable.
Even then I knew that this was bullshit, but inner beauty or health didn’t pay the bills. Disordered eating is, now, practically a part of me – it’s always lurking when I’m bored or feeling flabby, or bloated, or whatever. My weight has fluctuated over the past decade or so, as many women do, but I’m generally around a particular size and particular weight, and that’s where I’m usually happiest both physically and mentally. Over the past two years, despite occasional lapses into more disordered forms of eating, I have found a healthy lifestyle that works well for me and allows me to maintain a weight I’m comfortable with or drop a few pounds if I felt the need.
Now, though, I can’t control this weight gain. I can’t diet this tummy bulge away, and to attempt to do so would be dangerous to a thing that is literally reliant on me for everything that it is or can potentially be. My jeans got too tight and I had a bit of a cry. I can’t zip up the back of a dress because my boobs and ribcage have expanded, and I can’t do a detox diet to slim back into it. This is the way I have monitored and controlled my body for pretty much the entirety of my adult life: an endless cycle of diets tipping into more extreme forms of eating, that finally have no bearing on how tight my tights are.
This is scary as I have spent around twenty years of life forcing my body into an ‘ideal’, and now it’s completely going its own way without any intervention from me. It’s like I’m on the outside watching this thing happen, and I can’t stop it. I mean I don’t *want* to stop it, but relinquishing that control is so difficult.
I’m trying to continue being healthy, and realise that the scales have no relevance any more – you could argue that they never really did. I’m also trying really hard not to compare my weight gain to the ‘ideal’ charts that pop up on various websites (because I’m about 3.5lbs over the top end of the spectrum at the moment, and that’s horrifying to me).
I’m also attempting, and often failing, to compare myself and my appearance to the insta-perfect pregnancies. I had hoped that being pregnant would mean I no longer felt the need to juxtapose myself with social media ideals, and could instead love my body for what it was doing. Instead, I’m looking at glowing models cradling perfectly pert bumps, as I seem to be slowly expanding sideways into the neighbouring counties, and I’m wondering why their Spuds are popping out beautifully under their buxom chests, as my Spud seems intent on reaching my knees before Christmas.
The non-crazy part of my brain, the aforementioned rational speck in there, is amazed at what’s happening to my body. But the larger, gibbering wreck part is wondering why the boobs looking back at her in the mirror have nips the size of dinner plates, and whether I could lie on my tummy and pretend I was a Weeble. Each day the Apps that T and I have downloaded tell us something new and incredible about Spud, and it’s wonderful, it really is; and T tells me all the time how incredible I am (even though I’m not consciously doing all that much, my body seems to be quite happy left to its own devices right now).
Post-Spud, I’m scared of being able to lose the weight again afterwards. I’ve always struggled with losing weight anyway, hence developing that eating disorder in my teens, and I know that it’s not recommended for nursing mothers to diet for a few months post-birth. I also know that I’ll find that dictum rather difficult to stick to, and instead I’ll find myself in an online hole of celebrities looking stick-thin and smiley half an hour after giving birth while I’m still able to hide whole meals in my belly-rolls. Although that wouldn’t be all bad, I guess.
In a society that constantly places a horribly high bar of expectation on women, regardless of their procreational state, why should I have ever thought that pregnancy would be a time when my brain could be excused of obsessing over appearance? And being told that I shouldn’t, for Spud’s sake, only makes me feel worse because I feel like I’m being a bad mother before Spud’s even here.
Partly it’s because I watched Sigourney Weaver in ‘Alien’ at a very young and impressionable age, but a lot of it goes much deeper than that.
I’m scared of my body – it’s doing something that I have no control over; it’s changing and growing, and it’s really quite remarkable from an objective, rational point of view.
BUT… as a teenager I was very overweight and I consciously developed an eating disorder to control this. I lost a lot of weight in a relatively short span of time and achieved my dream of going to dance college, then training and working as a dancer. Obviously, in that industry, there is *so* much emphasis placed on appearance, and beauty (and therefore bookability) is directly tied to a bodily aesthetic. I never really fit that mould anyway, and occasionally lost jobs because a male booker/manager/promoter outright said that I was too fat for “their” stage. Even into my late twenties this affected my mental health, my self-esteem, and, therefore, the worth I placed on my own body – it was only worth what it looked like, not what it felt like, or what it could do. Outward appearance was the way I earned a living, and thus I had to conform to the (literally) narrow aesthetic of a mainstream ideal of what was considered to be beautiful and bookable.
Even then I knew that this was bullshit, but inner beauty or health didn’t pay the bills. Disordered eating is, now, practically a part of me – it’s always lurking when I’m bored or feeling flabby, or bloated, or whatever. My weight has fluctuated over the past decade or so, as many women do, but I’m generally around a particular size and particular weight, and that’s where I’m usually happiest both physically and mentally. Over the past two years, despite occasional lapses into more disordered forms of eating, I have found a healthy lifestyle that works well for me and allows me to maintain a weight I’m comfortable with or drop a few pounds if I felt the need.
This is scary as I have spent around twenty years of life forcing my body into an ‘ideal’, and now it’s completely going its own way without any intervention from me. It’s like I’m on the outside watching this thing happen, and I can’t stop it. I mean I don’t *want* to stop it, but relinquishing that control is so difficult.
I’m trying to continue being healthy, and realise that the scales have no relevance any more – you could argue that they never really did. I’m also trying really hard not to compare my weight gain to the ‘ideal’ charts that pop up on various websites (because I’m about 3.5lbs over the top end of the spectrum at the moment, and that’s horrifying to me).
I’m also attempting, and often failing, to compare myself and my appearance to the insta-perfect pregnancies. I had hoped that being pregnant would mean I no longer felt the need to juxtapose myself with social media ideals, and could instead love my body for what it was doing. Instead, I’m looking at glowing models cradling perfectly pert bumps, as I seem to be slowly expanding sideways into the neighbouring counties, and I’m wondering why their Spuds are popping out beautifully under their buxom chests, as my Spud seems intent on reaching my knees before Christmas.
Post-Spud, I’m scared of being able to lose the weight again afterwards. I’ve always struggled with losing weight anyway, hence developing that eating disorder in my teens, and I know that it’s not recommended for nursing mothers to diet for a few months post-birth. I also know that I’ll find that dictum rather difficult to stick to, and instead I’ll find myself in an online hole of celebrities looking stick-thin and smiley half an hour after giving birth while I’m still able to hide whole meals in my belly-rolls. Although that wouldn’t be all bad, I guess.
In a society that constantly places a horribly high bar of expectation on women, regardless of their procreational state, why should I have ever thought that pregnancy would be a time when my brain could be excused of obsessing over appearance? And being told that I shouldn’t, for Spud’s sake, only makes me feel worse because I feel like I’m being a bad mother before Spud’s even here.
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