The night before I gave birth to my daughter, I put on a lacy light purple bra and panty set. The only pretty thing in my drawer full of beige and shapeless maternity underwear. The underwire bra dug into the top of my ribcage, newly expanded in my last month of pregnancy. <\/p>\n
My husband stood by the door with our hospital bags. \u201cAre you ready?\u201d I had an induction scheduled for 10pm, unless I showed signs of labor before then. But my daughter seemed cozy and content in my belly, even two days past my due date.<\/p>\n
I called back to him. \u201cIn a minute!\u201d I had one last thing to do. Though the act of taking a selfie has always felt performative and uncomfortable to me, I wanted one to document this moment. I wasn\u2019t even sure why. But I\u2019d seen so many \u201cbaby in, baby out\u201d and \u201cnine months in, nine months out\u201d types of posts on Instagram, it somehow seemed obligatory.<\/p>\n
By age 32, I\u2019d already watched many of the influencers I followed on Instagram become mothers. I\u2019d seen their proud pregnancy selfies, their dutiful birth announcement posts: mama looking peacefully exhausted in a hospital bed, baby asleep on her bare chest, both cleaned up, without the sheen of blood and sweat and various other fluids that define so much of birth in real life. Then the caption: something life-affirming and tender. \u201cThis baby is already so loved.\u201d \u201cWe are so grateful.\u201d \u201cOur family is complete.\u201d <\/p>\n
One post<\/a>, from the \u201cmomfluencer\u201d Amber Fillerup, stood out to me. It was a photo of nine polaroids, one for each month of pregnancy, tracking her growing belly. She stood in profile, wearing the same sports bra and briefs in each. In the caption, she offered these words: <\/p>\n \u201cI just want to point out that while our bodies do crazy stuff for our babies these aren\u2019t \u2018horror stories\u2019 this is how our bodies work and a part of the journey. It\u2019s not always pain free or glamorous but that\u2019s what makes the sacrifice so beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n After I had my baby, I thought about her words a lot, about \u201cthe sacrifice\u201d required to bring new life into the world. I\u2019d just experienced a 17-hour labor with two failed epidurals, more interventions than I\u2019d planned for, and more pushing and pulling and tearing than I ever thought I could survive. <\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s what makes the sacrifice so beautiful.\u201d I couldn’t see it that way. Where was the beauty in such an arduous labor? In the third-degree tear that stung when I lowered myself into the bath or got out of bed? In the barbed-wire stitches holding me together? Where was the beauty in the wrinkled, stretched skin of my midsection or the once-firm contours of my body that now collapsed within themselves? <\/p>\n In the same caption, Amber Fillerup encouraged her followers who had given birth to comment with an experience from pregnancy, birth, or recovery they didn\u2019t expect. And people obliged with real, unfiltered anecdotes from the humorous (lopsided boobs) to the painful (postpartum contractions). It was a real conversation about the good, the bad, and the visceral parts of having a baby.<\/p>\n But so many who bravely shared their stories minimized the hardships, covered their comments in avalanches of gratitude for all their bodies had accomplished. They called their bodies \u201cmiraculous\u201d and \u201cincredible\u201d and concluded with multiple exclamation points. How, I wondered, were all these mothers able to conjure such deep wells of acceptance for their postpartum bodies? <\/p>\n I felt defective, selfish for fixating on my battle scars when I\u2019d been able to bring a healthy, new life into the world. As if my hesitation to love my strange new body took away some amount of love for my daughter, made me less grateful for her.<\/p>\n