Getting Bigger All the Time

In the second trimester of pregnancy, I started singing my own version of the Beatles' song “Getting Better”:

She's getting bigger all the time

Bigger, bigger, biiiiigger!

Because I really, truly was. We didn't own a scale at the time, so I didn't know exactly what I had weighed pre-pregnancy. What I did know from prenatal appointments (which always include a weigh-in, like you're doing The Biggest Loser in reverse) was that I was gaining a lot. The official recommendation for pregnant women is that they gain about 25 pounds, if they started pregnancy at a healthy weight. I hadn't been in outstanding health when I got pregnant, but I hadn't been overweight, either, so I felt good about packing on the pounds. I was growing a baby! Bring on the fro-yo!

Until, that is, I went to a WIC appointment (which almost always entail someone getting weighed – first the pregnant lady, then the baby). The numbers on the scale set off alarm bells in the nurses' heads: in the space of a month, I had gained something like fifteen pounds, which is a bit much for that space of time. Rapid weight gain can indicate a serious condition called preeclampsia, and the nurses fired off a series of questions about vision changes, headaches, and nausea. Finally satisfied that I had no other symptoms, the nurses concluded that I was just, well, getting bigger.

Not long after that appointment, I hit the recommended weight gain, with lots more pregnancy to go. My belly expanded, as did my upper arms and thighs. I started asking friends, “What do I do when I outgrow maternity clothes? Wear a mu-mu? Or a circus tent?” A friend's five-year-old son asked why the lower half of my belly was showing, and I tried to explain that even maternity shirts weren't big enough for me anymore. I joked with my husband that I was catching up to him, but the joke lost a little of its humor for me as I realized that, seriously, I was catching up to him.

I mostly felt at peace about my size. I resented that I never stayed one size long enough to get used to my dimensions, and as a result opened the refrigerator door into my belly at least once a day for the last trimester. But aside from some bruising, it was good. It was a relief to have a break from worrying about whether I looked pudgy in an outfit, and from trying to suck in my stomach while I looked at my profile in the mirror. I was supposed to be big, and more to the point, I couldn't help it. Big I was, and bigger I got, until my beautiful daughter was born. She weighed 8 lbs 13 oz. I weighed a bit more.

Then came the long year of having a newborn at home, a husband in grad school and working full-time, and a discouraging episode of postpartum depression. I was breastfeeding, which most of my female friends and relatives with experience had assured me would be the best and easiest way to lose weight. I didn't have energy to think about a regular exercise schedule (although one probably would have helped alleviate my PPD – but I was at a point where the cure was so difficult to initiate that I just lived with the disease). I nursed my baby and waited for my original body to reemerge as I shed pounds.

Nursing really does expend a significant number of calories, but some women's bodies go into survival mode and hang on to a few extra pounds of fat, just in case there's a famine. Such was the case with my prehistoric body, and the “few extra” left me about fifteen pounds heavier than when I had gotten pregnant. I started running shortly after Greta celebrated her first birthday (she celebrated by cutting three molars in the space of seven days; the festivities were limited). I bought a scale. I started keeping track of my weight with interest. I didn't diet, but I tried to eat with care. Then, four months into it, I injured a tendon in my right hip and was left with no way to exercise until I had completed a stint in physical therapy.

Post-PT, I resumed running and began, once again, to weigh myself. (I had quit weighing myself when I wasn't exercising, because that seemed like a recipe for despair.) I was pleased as I started seeing the number drop, little by little. And yet, there were moments of doubt: a friend shared a link on Facebook to a blog post about the (female) author ditching her bathroom scale so as to define herself with a measure more accurate than pounds and ounces. I worried that I was being shallow. I also began to notice how much Americans love to talk about weight – its relationship to our notion of beautiful bodies, its role in our health, how we fret over gaining it or celebrate losing it. And weight loss, especially for American women, is fraught with the specters of eating disorders, unhealthy fixation and comparison that alienates us from other women, and the cumulative effect of decades-worth of bombardment from advertisers, Hollywood, and so forth, all of whom are constantly insinuating that whatever size you are, it's probably the wrong size. It's not a healthy culture for celebrating the diversity of body shapes and the wonderful variety within the category “beautiful.”

So I felt like I was betraying the sisterhood by wanting to shed a few pounds. Here I was, deeply and passionately opposed to those voices in our society that tell women to take up less space – physically, emotionally, intellectually – and here I was trying to get a little smaller¹. I wanted to hang on to the body-love I had experienced in the large, curvaceous person I was when I was pregnant. I also wanted to recognize the shape in the mirror, the old shape that had served me so well and fit into my jeans so easily. My pregnant body had widened the space in my mind about what it meant for me to look good and healthy, and to be happy and in tune with my own physicality. I wanted to hang on to that emotional and psychological big-ness, but I also wanted to be my old, smaller size again.

I kept my discomfort on a back burner until I came across a description of getting back in shape post-pregnancy as a woman reclaiming her body. That nailed it for me. Pregnancy is the constant nurture of what occasionally feels like a small, parasitic being that steals the enamel from your teeth. Then comes breastfeeding, which (should the mother choose and be able to do it) basically means that for six months, you are responsible for the nourishment of a rapidly growing mammal whose only sustenance is you. I would sometimes look at my daughter, in the days before she started table food, and think, “I built that. Yep, that's all me, right there. All those ligaments and eyelashes and blood cells. Well done me.” But now that glowing peach of a baby was past nursing, even on a part-time basis; it felt like it was time to reclaim what had been temporarily given over to my daughter's physical well-being: my body.

Losing weight as reclaiming my body felt much better, much righter, to me, but it still wasn't quite enough. I didn't want to merely return to the body I had once had. I wanted something more than simply taking up less space in the world, and a physical counterpart to the larger emotional space I had grown to inhabit and love as a result of pregnancy. I resolved to get stronger. Strength training would allow me to keep running without re-injuring my hip, but it also would prove to give me a bigger self: bigger muscles, and along with them, a bigger sense of what I could ask of my body and what I could expect it to do for me. Now I had brought the bigness and smallness I desired into harmony with each other; I reclaimed both my pre-pregnancy body (in pounds and ounces) and I reclaimed my during-pregnancy relationship with my body.

I want to carry this notion of bigness through my life, for the sake of myself and especially my daughter. I want her to feel good about the space she takes up, and not feel the need to corset her emotions or intellect or personality into a shape deemed more fitting by those elements of our culture that instruct little girls (and later, women) to be still, quiet and polite. Whatever their dimensions, it's women of strength – be it physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual – who liberate me from the confining notions of femininity purveyed by pop culture; I hope to be a woman of strength for my daughter. I hope to be one of those women who takes up all the room she needs. What could be more beautiful than that?

1I got this idea of women being told to take up less space from a documentary I watched in SOC 101. If I can track down what it was, I'll update this footnote to include a citation.

***UPDATE: An astute reader suggested I pulled the idea from Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly (probably #3 in the series of 4). I believe that this is correct, and I recommend it as a thought-provoking look at how women are (mis)represented in American advertising.