The Body in Bloom, or Adventures in Shape-Shifting. PregBlog#3

I grew up constantly worried about my weight.  What preteen or teen girl doesn’t? And I gained a lot of it.  And I lost a lot of it. Convinced I was getting “fat,” (though, not only coincidentally, I was entering womanhood), I went on my first diet when I was 11.  I used diet books, counted calories in a little journal, measuring each scoop of peanut butter and each bite of rice cake.  I was not actually “fat”; I was getting boobs and hips and curves, but that fact was lost on me.  (To add: In our rather-militaristic Houston, TX PE class someone had measured my BMI and said it was higher than average, though I think I weighed about 110, ran a decent mile and won the sit-up contest; they also fanatically measured us for scoliosis and sent many of us home with confusing results. Come to think of it, I also got braces for my incorrect bite shortly after I got glasses for my bad eyes – adolescence is a time of measurement).  Clearly, I had not been exposed to what good curves could be, thinking that lanky and straight (and also, not coincidentally, white) was my dream aesthetic.  This was the late 80s, an era for tracksuits, jogging, Lean Cuisines, diet sodas and no-butter in favor of margarine (the kind later to be found to be very bad).  Instead of enjoying what was the beautiful blossoming of my body, I was set on preventing it, and I’m pretty sure the calorie restriction wasn’t awesome for my metabolism.

Fast-forward to the last three years of high school, when I actually did gain extra weight.  This time, I owe it to a little-more-than typical teen angst and insecurity — I hid behind baggy tee-shirts as I let my body pack on a safe and protective layer.  Not seeing others like me in a markedly un-diverse town and having moved around the country 5 times by the age of 16, I ate weird s**it like coolwhip and tortillas: comfort food.  This was the Mohave Desert east of Los Angeles and I can also blame the desert, the arid, treeless, waterless place that yielded far too many suicides and drug addictions along with a subculture of weirdo outcasts indulging in our melancholia.  The conservative, culture-less and very-basic Catholic School with only a sprinkle of electives was run by jocks, cheerleaders and priests, and I rebelled by wearing Dad’s blazers and thrift-store oddities, often oversized and masculine. I hid behind a curtain of angle-cut hair and remember hating looking at mirrors, turning my face as though seeing myself would release the boogey-man. I also felt just about as equally “person” as girl, enjoying a bit of the androgynous.

Leaping forward at least two decades, I’m a healthy, active, in-between-sized, femme-presenting Filipina woman in her early 40s who loves her own body but still fights fears of gaining too much weight, “losing it” or “falling apart.”  After all, after 40, heck, after 35, aren’t we supposed to just go “downhill” or certainly “over the hill”? Aren’t we told we’re less desireable?  As our metabolism often naturally does slow down in our 30s, I have accepted the 5-10 extra pounds that has become part of my norm, despite being active and health-conscious.  I recognize my privileges as looking younger than my years, and yet because I didn’t grow up feeling pretty and got little romantic attention (from any gender) until mid-college — I don’t take my late-blooming for granted.  I still fear all the things we women get conditioned to, as we age: wrinkles and blemishes, uncontrollable weight gain, tiredness, declining flexibility or mobility.  The media is obsessed with youth and thinness, even if we are not.  Let’s add that there’s not a lot of representation of a gracefully-aging woman of color.

Now add: becoming pregnant.  Ha! All of the above on my list, bring them on, hormones and blooming belly!  Let’s start with “wrinkles,” one you may not expect: I normally have pretty unwrinkled skin (thanks to melanin/genes), but beginning my first trimester, I both got acne breakouts AND itchy patches/wrinkles under my eyes at once.  As someone joked with me, it’s a little like being an old teenager….who’s pregnant.

Weight gain — well, we can’t avoid that, and shouldn’t.  A pregnant woman at average gains about 25-35 lbs during pregnancy, give or take, some more, some less. The amniotic fluid, extra blood volume, body mass, and the baby itself must increase; we literally grow to provide the baby nutrients.   I’m in the late-second trimester, said to be the fun time when your energy returns, first-trimester nuisances calm down, and you get used to being pregs. It’s a time when you can revel in not having to explain weight gain to people who are asking themselves, “is she?”  The belly announces itself now, loudly, not in a whisper.  I had a major growth spurt between about week 17-21; my belly felt like a taut balloon being pushed out from the inside.  “Hold on now!” I felt like telling it.  On the outside it seemed all of sudden, I was like, “boom!” Going swimming in a bikini with the melon-belly was fun.

What I love about this time is being more aware of the sense of a person sharing my body, this tumbling, squirming, peddling being.  The Week-20 full anatomical sonogram leads to relief for many, since we can check on all the major organs and parts.  In mine, he nearly waved at us and did all kinds of what I’ll call dance moves since he has a dancer mommy. Seeing all of this correlating with the sensation confirms that indeed, I was feeling fetal movement, not just imagining things.  Until about Week 17, I was still waking up thinking it had all been a dream. Now, not so.  

I’m not yet at the point of feeling so heavy I’m lumbering, or hurting, but I have those possibilities to look forward to.  Picking things up and tying my shoes is already weird to say the least, and I imagine myself even less able to bend once the baby occupies even more room. 

It’s a new kind of learning to love my body.  And all of this has been to say that I’m used to the ebbs and flows; I pay attention not because I have always felt good in my skin, but because I haven’t.  I have learned that strength and stamina are important qualities of feeling beautiful, more than how we “look” on the outside …our beauty comes from how we feel (I tried to avoid the cliche, but now I have to say it: it comes from within).  And I feel so in love with this little fish sharing this body with me that I’m sure that the love shows on my (wrinkled, acne-d but glowing) face.  

The body in bloom for the pregnant woman is the body shapeshifting, because unlike a flower, I won’t bloom and then wither; I’ll keep changing as the body does, pregnant or not.  I hear from mommies that postpartum bodies are still changing and it is not easy, nor the same for everyone.  Rather than focus on going “back” to normal, just as in aging we have to accept that we cannot go “back” to our youth— I want to look forward to continually changing, growing new senses, new awareness, new ways of being in the body and in the world. And becoming a parent will be a shapeshifting journey to last many years more.