Mom Encourages Other Women To Make Peace With Their Post-Baby Bodies

Constance Hall wants moms to know it’s okay if your body changes after babies

Pregnancy and birth bring a lot of new challenges to a woman’s life, but one of the hardest is learning to love your postpartum body. There are new lumps and bumps, nothing fits like it used to, and the pressure to look like you never gave birth at all is very real. That’s why one mom blogger recently shared this moving confession about how she finally made peace with her post-baby form.

Constance Hall, who’s famous for her raw social media posts on everything from “parent sex” to taking kids to restaurants, writes on Facebook that after having each of her four kids, she always felt insane pressure to get thin. “I used to be obsessed with my weight,” she confesses in her post. “I thought skinny was beautiful. My least favourite part of being a mum was losing the baby weight.”

Along with the post, she shared a photo of herself holding her son and wearing nothing but a bra and some jeans. She says she continued hating her body until a few years ago when she found a lump on her breast and was “so scared that I wouldn’t be granted the privilege to raise these perfect children of mine.”

The lump turned out to be benign, but the scare taught Hall something important about herself and her body. “That week, I couldn’t eat yet my weight was the furthest thing from my mind,” she says. “When the doctor told me it was a cyst and not cancer I was flooded with relief. I grabbed my kids so tightly and we all went out for a huge lunch with loads of food and hugs and laughter. I was embarrassed for placing so much importance on my weight for so many years.”

Every mom can relate to struggling to accept their postpartum body. Even if you didn’t gain much weight, barely showed, or were able to get back into your pre-baby jeans in just a few weeks, pregnancy and birth change your body in ways for which it’s impossible to prepare. It’s difficult to look in the mirror and be okay with what’s there; it’s difficult to accept that some things might never “bounce back.”

We live in a world that’s constantly telling us we don’t measure up, that we’ve let ourselves go, and that we should be 100 percent focused on looking hot all the time, but that’s not reality. Hall says, more than anything, she recognizes that the ability to grow and change, to carry babies, and to be healthy enough to take care of them is a privilege we should all cherish.

“Now I realise that not losing your baby weight isn’t a sign of letting go,” she says. “It’s a sign that this Queen has evolved, she’s realised that life is not about a number on a scale, happiness is about gratitude and love and the privilege that is life. Nothing could be more beautiful than that.”