Almost as soon as you become a mum, it seems like all the media you see is telling you to go backwards.
Ads will promise to help you ‘get your pre-baby body back’ or ‘get back into your pre-baby jeans’. You’ll also be encouraged to get your sex-life back, or get your career ‘back on track’. Get back to ‘you’.
All this backwards talk really really gets on my nerves.
It simply reaffirms that we use attractiveness as a key measure of success for a woman. If you can get back to how attractive you were before you had children (which by implication makes you unattractive), then you are a success.
Add to that the implied message behind ‘getting your sex-life back’ after kids, which measures a woman’s success by how much they can please their partner sexually. Never mind being the tiredest you’ve ever been, you’d better make sure that you’re able to jump in the sack at any point while you’re trying to raise a tiny human.
Then there’s the drive to prioritise getting back to your career too. Hey mothers, it’s not enough for you to be raising a human, looking like a goddess and sexing like one too, you’ll also need to be juggling a full time job and probably getting a promotion quickly as well to make up for all that maternity ‘time off’.
Why do we keep telling mothers to look backwards at their life before children? Why don’t we tell them to lean in to what they’re learning about their life now, and the person they are growing into?
I honestly think it’s impossible to ‘get back’ to anything from your pre-children life. Having children and becoming a parent irreversibly changes the entirety of your life. Trying to fight against that rather than embracing it is where a lot of the struggle comes in.
Instead of trying to get back our pre-baby bodies, let’s accept that we are now older, and have birthed a human person, maybe more than one. Let’s look at the stretch marks and the thicker thighs and lean into how we have grown. Let’s concentrate on feeling stronger than we have ever felt before, and knowing more about our bodies (and how amazing they are) than we have ever known before.
Instead of lamenting the loss of a pre-kids sex life, let’s explore the idea that sex could be even better than it was before! Maybe with less time-windows for sex, the intimacy becomes more intense, and the getting down to what we really like happens quicker. Maybe we can be more confident in our bodies and what we like.
Instead of pressuring ourselves to climb up that career ladder with a babe in arms, let’s re-evaluate what job satisfaction and ‘success’ actually means to us since we’ve become mothers. Maybe the ideal job is a different picture now, let’s make it ok to investigate what that looks like.
Raising little kids is very consuming. When you get a few minutes to raise your head above water, it can be difficult to remember who ‘you’ are among all of that. Maybe trying to remember who you are is the opposite of what we should be doing. Maybe we should be curious about who we are becoming instead. Being a parent is a huge journey of learning and adjusting, and to fight that is to resist all the new lessons and opportunities open to us.
Stop telling new mums to look backwards. Let’s look forwards instead.
Juggle Struggle blog 