Post-pregnancy, your body changes in multiple ways. But the changes are not always how you’d expect it to be. Here’s a mommy’s perspective of what some changes, which not many people or magazines talk about, will be.
1. Your Body Tunes To A New Frequency
This is the only way I can explain it: It’s like my son and I are tuned to the same frequency. He can just cough, whimper, whisper, and I’ll wake up from a dead sleep and instinctively go to him. It happens all the time.
Last summer, for instance, we were hanging out in my friend’s backyard and my 5-year-old boy was inside on the couch, ready to fall asleep.
“I think I hear him,” I told my friends, including my husband. No one heard a peep.
When I went inside, someone in the kitchen said, “There’s NO WAY you heard him! He just quietly said your name and you walked in!”
I didn’t hear him; I felt him.
2. You’ll Randomly Hear Imaginary Crying
Whether it’s the sound of the washing machine, or the shower, or my husband’s wheezy snores, my brain hears sounds and interprets them as my son crying. All the time! It’s impossible to guess the number of times I’ve run into his room in a panic, so sure that I was hearing his cries, only to find a sleeping child.
3. You’ll Develop Jedi Mind Tricks
You figure out some energy-pushing sorcery to get him to sleep as a baby. And you’ll SWEAR IT WORKS.
4. Your Heart Will Get Heavier
I knew I’d pack baby weight on my thighs, but I didn’t know I’d have a permanent weight on my heart.
5. Your Breasts Will Leak No Matter Whose Babt Cries
They’ll also leak during sex, by the way. That’s a “weird and wild” change the magazines failed to mention.
6. You Will Lose Any Sense Of Modesty
Especially if you’re breastfeeding. Those aren’t just breasts anymore; they’re magical feeding machines that operate to their own biological wiring, and you had no idea they were capable of such feats. You’re proud of those things! And your baby is hungry! NOW DIVERT YOUR EYES OR DEAL WITH IT, SIR.
7. Your Emotions Are Like Open Nerve Endings
When you pass a horrific car accident, or you hear someone being ridiculed, or you watch the news and another child has gone missing, you’ll feel it deeper and stronger than ever before. (That’s someone’s baby!) Bring up the subjects of foster care, starving children, or global pandemics, and you might become temporarily insane. Your heart won’t only feel heavier, it’ll periodically break under the pressure of a sad and scary reality that you just brought a newborn into.
8. You’ll Appreciate Your Body More
While I was Googling what would happen to my stomach, skin, feet, hips, and breasts, I didn’t realize that the real change wouldn’t be to my physical body, but my relationship with my body.
In my pre-pregnant life, I was always at battle with my body. I pushed it, starved it, dreamed of the ways I’d change it. But during my pregnancy, it was the first time I was actually inside of my body, listening to what it needed, witnessing its dormant, primal functions.
Even now, six years later, I still have an appreciation and respect for this life-birthing machine, for my body’s capabilities, and for all we’ve been through together.
My body is a little different — it’s stronger and softer and a little marked up. The other day I jumped rope in my CrossFit class and peed myself, because childbirth. But after seeing all that this body can do, I much prefer the post-baby version.
The one I listen to.
The one I’m proud of.
The one that gave me my child.
Credits:babble
