Parenting

New Mom's Response To 'When Are You Due?' Will Give You All The Feels

by Julie Scagell
Updated: 
Originally Published: 
Image via Laura Mazza

This mom’s response to being asked “when are you due?” is pretty much perfect

The only thing worse than being asked if you’re pregnant when you’re not is being the person who actually asked the question. As a general rule of thumb, commenting on a woman’s body (ever, under any circumstance) is a nope. So, when one Australian mom was asked that question (four weeks after delivering her baby), she understandably had some feelings on the matter, and they may surprise you.

“I got asked the three words that every woman dreads when she is not pregnant (well four words)..”

“So when are you due?” Mum on the Run blogger Laura Mazza wrote next to a picture with a sign that reads, “5 weeks postpartum with a burger baby.” “Not due for my period, not due for a poo, not due for the promotion… when am I due to have my baby? That’s what she meant,” she said.

Mazza said she wanted to tell the woman the truth, that she’d had him a month ago “but instead I said ‘October!’ Because I’m an idiot and didn’t want her to feel bad,” as women do.

But Mazza said she wasn’t angry or upset by the woman’s question because she said she does still look pregnant, “and really, why the fuck wouldn’t I?” Hallelujah, amen, no shit, her baby is a month old.

“I keep having babies two years apart. I’ve grown their bones, their eyes, their little noses and toes and I’ve created their little beautiful hearts,” Mazza continued. “My organs squished down to allow them to grow and my muscles separated to let them grow bigger. I birthed them from my lady garden and my sun roof and I fed them from my body.”

Mazza, like most (ok, all) women, know the pressures placed on women and how our bodies look, especially after we’ve given birth. And so we internalize that pressure and put even more on ourselves to get that “pre-baby body” back as fast as humanly possible. “The whole thing about societal expectations is real. Women are praised when they bounce back, or lose all signs of giving birth,” Mazza tells Scary Mommy. “But if a woman looks like she’s given birth like most women do, it’s this stigma that she’s overweight, lazy, has let herself go.”

The mom says she’s fed up of women feeling bad about how their bodies look and wonders why any of us have to feel bad about looking a certain way, given “all we have achieved” by bringing another human being into this world. “On our death beds, are we going to be talking about how we looked after giving birth, or are we going to be talking about the people we gave birth to?” Mazza wrote.

The mom-of-three tells us she wanted to post the picture to show people that this is normal. “The more people will be accepting within themselves, allow themselves to enjoy the moment of all they’ve achieved and enjoy motherhood instead of worrying about their bodies,” she said.

And for anyone asking, she’s not looking for health or fitness advice. “I’m happy,” she wrote. “I ate pizza for breakfast because I’m that level of tired. Take my baby for a night and I’ll drink a kale smoothie instead, okay?”

Preach.

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