(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)

It happened just a few days ago, during the greeting time at church, when a woman I’ve known for years hugged my neck and kissed my cheek and then said, You look so beautiful.

I managed to hold back my laugh, but I couldn’t stop words from sliding out after hers. I sure don’t feel beautiful.

We never do, she said, and she smiled and walked back to the seat beside her husband.

Those words. They have chased me since.

We never do, do we?

We who are carrying the beauty of new life, who are right here in the middle of backs aching and stomachs stretching and clothes cutting into places they shouldn’t be, even though they’re supposed to be made for this, we are not often the first ones to say we feel beautiful.

We feel lumbering and awkward and swollen and heavy and achy and frumpy and all those things that disqualify us from beautiful.

It took everything I had today to put on those getting-uncomfortable stretchy jeans instead of the yoga pants I wear almost every day. It took everything I had to pull on that form-fitting green-sleeved maternity shirt that shows the round ball throwing off my center of gravity, instead of hiding behind an oversized T-shirt I stole from my husband’s side of the closet.

And even though I made this great effort, I feel anything but beautiful.

The realization makes me feel sad.

///

I never really wanted to have children.

I was young when I became aware of my body, comparing it to others and noticing the differences. I was never as thin or as strong or as beautiful, and I worked hard to measure up.

I watched what I ate and started skipping meals and made bargains with myself before I even knew what it all meant, before I knew how it would lock me in chains.

If I can just be as small as her…
If I can just get a stomach like hers…
If I can just fit into the same size she wears…

And then I got older, and I watched high school girls in grades ahead and grades below swell with unplanned babies, and I never wanted to be them.

I would never lose my body like that, I said.

I wrote it in my journal.

I told my mom.

I whispered it in the dark hours of the night, when I thought of the hips I already hated and the stomach I had to kill myself to make flat and the arms that required an hour a day to stay cut.

And then I met my husband.

We were married two years, and the longing to start a family came knocking.

I almost said no, because I was the thinnest I’d ever been and I finally felt good and strong and almost maybe beautiful. But then I missed a period, and I took a pregnancy test and three more just to be sure, and then I sat in a bathroom and cried over the plus signs lined up in a row.

I cried because I was happy, because I would be a mother.

I cried because I was terrified, because I would be a mother.

I cried because somewhere along the way beauty had become tangled around thin. Skinny. Hot body.

Those plus signs told me I was losing something, too, and I didn’t know how to reconcile the loss.

///

When I’ve talked with people about body image, about the eating disorders of my past and the still-present constant striving to always be thinner and the way that crooked desire never really leaves us, I often tell them that the struggle seemed to get better with children.

But the way I feel today, with nine weeks left on the countdown, I can’t say it’s completely true.

Because I stopped looking at myself in the mirror five weeks ago.

I don’t care to see the way my belly has stretched so thin there are veins running up and down my skin so it all looks blue and bruised.

I don’t care to see the varicose vein that just showed up on the back of my left knee two weeks ago, the one I thought might be a blood clot but is, instead, a “normal” part of pregnancy.

I don’t care to see the fuller face staring back at me.

Every time I feel that pinch in the middle of my back, I feel unbeautiful. Every time I feel hungry enough to eat, even though I just ate an hour ago, I feel unbeautiful. Every time I step on a scale and see all the pounds added, I feel unbeautiful.

So I stand in front of a TV screen and gasp through pregnancy interval training. I bend my body into positions that hurt like hell during prenatal yoga. I speed walk until I’m breathing too hard and sweating too much and my back is screaming, because I have to get 30 minutes in before I’ll let myself quit.

I try to pretend their good-natured jokes and comments, “They’re sure it’s not twins, right?” and “Sure one isn’t hiding?” and “Wow, you sure got big fast. Twins again?” doesn’t hit me right where it hurts.

Here I am, in my last pregnancy, and I cannot just let myself be pregnant.

Why can’t I just let myself be pregnant?

The real truth is, pregnancy does not heal something like this. Sometimes it only makes it worse.

///

I blew up in that first pregnancy.

Forty pounds added to my frame over those nine months, and then he was born and I still had 25 to lose.

They were just numbers, but they were everything to me.

I hated that after-pregnancy body, where jeans I’d worn for years didn’t fit right anymore, all tight in the hips and butt and thighs.

But I worked hard to lose it all, and then came number 2, and five months after him we were pregnant with the third, and I lost track of all the weight I needed to lose to make my pre-pregnancy goal again.

Then came the fourth pregnancy, when I was five pounds from reaching my goal, and I knew I didn’t want to blow up like I had for all the others, so I counted calories and kept running and told myself if I could keep from breaking out the maternity clothes in the first 14 weeks, it would be some kind of victory.

Except week 11 started creeping closer, and those pants were getting tighter and tighter, and I stressed and worried and worked all the harder.

I walked into the doctor’s office for that finally-made-it-to-the-safe-point appointment, and the scale hadn’t changed, and I felt a small victory that only showed in my smile.

And then they looked for her heartbeat, the same one I’d heard four weeks ago, and it was gone.

It took me a long time to forgive myself for that little celebration I felt in my heart, for the no weight gain that really only meant a baby had died.

It felt all wrong, the way I’d obsessed over weight and worked so hard and kept to my don’t-gain-too-much plan, the way I’d cared more about maintaining a body than embracing and growing a baby.

I would never, ever do it again.

///

And yet, here we are, in this place where my husband asks a simple question, Are you hungry? and my brain goes to war.

No.
Yes.
No, no, no.
But yes. Yes. So hungry.

I really tried to enjoy it this time around, because it’s my last, because this baby is the last one who will need room in my womb, the last one who will keep me from sleeping in these weeks before meeting him, the last one who will stretch me in all these ways I can see and all the ways I cannot.

But still I felt that relief when I spent the first fourteen weeks too sick to eat, and the scale dropped. Still I felt glad when a stomach virus in the second trimester knocked me out for three days and the scale dropped more. Still I felt victorious when I reached the halfway point and the file showed no weight gain at all.

I know better than to let a number on a scale define me. I do.

It’s just that, even now, I can feel its haunting in my knees carrying all this extra weight and my back arching in unnatural ways and the stomach muscles I can’t even see anymore.

I’ve made my after-baby lose-the-weight plan, and I am counting down the days until I can get started.

I know it’s wrong. But I want to be the woman “they” all point to and say, I can’t believe that body has had six babies.

Because it’s a badge. Or something like that.

Beauty, even after all these years, is still tangled around thin.

And I just want to be beautiful again.

///

Three months after the baby-losing we got pregnant with twins.

Ten weeks in I woke from a nap and went to the bathroom. Blood dropped out in a great gush.

I sat on the toilet while my husband ran to the corner store, because we were on our anniversary vacation and I hadn’t though to bring any period-related items with me, since I was pregnant, and then he rushed me to the hospital while I cried beside him because I thought we’d lost two more.

I had a blood clot, caught between my uterus and the placental wall, and no doctors could tell me if my babies were safe, because there was no knowing.

They sent me home on bed rest.

I spent seven months on bed rest, when I could not even walk for exercise, because no one knew what might tear the placenta more.

And I did it. Because I could not lose another baby.

I didn’t worry about my weight, even though the pressure sat right behind my eyes, where it always sits when I try not to think about it.

It took me two years after having twins, two years of intense interval training and three-minute planks and four miles of running every other morning, to finally reach a place where I was even close to my pre-pregnancy goal.

I would never do that again, either.

///

So here we are.

Here we are in a place where I can hardly eat without feeling guilty, where I work too hard to stay fit, where I cannot even look in a mirror without feeling that anxiety creep into the back of my throat.

Here we are in a place that feels anything but beautiful.

What is it about this time, when new life is demanding room, that makes it so hard to believe our swelling skin and fuller face and sturdier legs are all beautiful?

What is it about these last few weeks, when we can barely walk without pain twisting in a back or a leg or our feet, that make it so hard to feel beautiful?

What is it about those first six weeks before a doctor signs off on the safety of exercise, when our skin feels flabby and disappointing and destroyed, that make it so hard to know that new mother is the most beautiful skin we can wear?

We look around at all those other pregnant women, and we wish we could be them, because I bet their scale hasn’t reached the number ours has, and they’re so much cuter pregnant than we are, and they’ll probably drop the weight in no time, while we’ll have to struggle along for years.

Maybe we will not ever feel beautiful here, because we know about the stretch marks we work hard to hide, and we know just how many pounds we’ve added, and we can’t help but compare what we have with what those magazine mothers have.

Maybe we won’t always feel beautiful. Maybe that’s not even the point. Maybe we just have to know that WE ARE.

We are not exempt from this body image struggle, the one that has chased us all our lives, just because our body is being used to create new life. But we can choose to turn our backs on its voice.

So today, when a little girl, not more than 4 years old, comes up to me at my boys’ school and says, Do you have a baby in your belly? and I say, Yes I do, and she says, You’re so beautiful, I choose to believe her.

We are beautiful.

We are beautiful with our big bellies and our shiny jagged lines in the hidden places and our clothes that have stopped fitting.

We are beautiful with our increasing scale number and our puffy didn’t-sleep-last-night eyes and our feet too swollen to even wear shoes at this point.

We are beautiful with our new life.

Believe it, achy sister. Know it. And then live into it.

I will be limping along, right beside you, trying to live into it, too.