This morning, at the gym, I was working on my triceps and focusing on my breath - something I’m having to remind myself of doing now that I’m officially in the third trimester and I don’t have the capacity to breathe like I once did - when I noticed a bulge popping out in the middle of my stomach on every exhale. Instantly, I knew what this was, I had read about it and researched it for months fearing that it would happen to me as it did to many other women. It's called Diastasis Recti, or more commonly known as abdominal separation. According to the Cleveland Clinic, this condition affects up to 60% of pregnant women, varying from small abdominal separation that heals in six to eight weeks and a larger one that can take up to six to twelve months to heal.
Now I’m not an expert and I never pretend to be, but seeing the bulge’s appearance, I assumed it’s a large abdominal separation. Because, first, that’s just who I am, I go to the worst-case scenario. And second, because again! I read about it for months, dreading that it would happen to me! So of course, it did. Just like four weeks ago, when I dreaded having gestational diabetes knowing I had done everything to make sure I wouldn’t, my test results came back positive. Am I speaking these things into existence?
When I noticed the coning in my midline, my whole world shattered. This might sound dramatic, but that’s the only way I can describe the sinking feeling I had when I realized what it was. I continued to breathe and engage my core to make sure that what I was seeing was true, and it was. I immediately stopped my workout and went down a Google rabbit hole, as you would expect me to. I’m certain it didn’t help, but it confirmed my suspicions. I’m a master at self-diagnosing, I knew I had a generalized anxiety disorder years before I was diagnosed with it. This might not be healthy, but I know myself and my body, believe it or not. I know when something isn’t right. It's a guttural feeling.
I want to take you back to a couple of months ago, when I began losing some of my hair and noticing strands of it just cutting in the middle leaving me with dry brittle little hairs. The first thing my doctor told me when he confirmed my pregnancy was to not color my hair until I give birth. This wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to hear, like a lot of other women who have been deep down the trenches of beauty culture, I relied on my hair to make me feel better. A haircut here, highlights there, brunette during the winter, a little blonder during the summer is what made some difficult periods of my life bearable. From grief to debilitating anxiety-inducing events in my life I may have not shared here, that was one of the ways I coped. But this was for the sake of my unborn child, and so it didn’t matter, I forced myself to think. I did start avoiding mirrors around the house when my roots started to grow, and it took me eight weeks to accept that this was what I looked like now. Acceptance that lasted a couple of minutes before I obsessed over the dry brittle hairs in front of the mirror. One more thing I had to contend with. And the list would be endless.
It hit me that I no longer had control over the way I looked and still look. So, I got a haircut. A Band-Aid to a deeper-rooted problem that would eventually rear its ugly head again. Stretch marks around my breasts started to become more prominent and they now surround each breast. I was happier when it was an underboob situation and I didn’t have to see it. Denial is sometimes a girl’s best friend. I gained weight, obviously, but much more than I thought I would. For some reason, I thought I had control and/or say in this one area, which historically has never been the case for any woman. Yet, it was something else I wasn’t equipped to handle emotionally. Every time I saw my doctor’s face after he weighed me, the disappointment as he wrote it down, I knew I was losing another part of myself.
My sense of self slowly but surely dissipated.
And it didn’t hit me until today, when I was coming back home from the gym, that what I call “my sense of self” is and has always been about my looks. Whatever this sense of identity is, I don’t know another one. I always relied on my looks to make me feel better. To the point where if I didn’t look “presentable”, whatever the fuck that means - excuse my French -, I didn’t feel worthy of stepping out into the world and it would just ruin my day before it even started. If I looked into the mirror and my hair and/or face didn’t cooperate, I knew it was going to be a bad day. Emphasis on cooperate. Cooperate with what the beauty ideals are. The ones shoved down our throats.
Clearly, there’s a visceral change that happened from the moment I saw those two pink lines on my home pregnancy test. Some things don’t matter like they used to and the excitement of motherhood is so enveloping it sometimes overwhelms me. But this was one area of who I thought I was and am that I didn’t realize was so messed up until this morning.
It didn’t matter the happiness I have been feeling lately as I started my third trimester, or the excitement about meeting my child, or the love I wake up with in my heart every single morning, or the immense happiness I get from feeling my baby kick. None of these things mattered this morning when I looked down and saw something that didn’t align with what I thought was okay for me to look like. My instant thoughts revolved around my body postpartum, how I wasn’t going to “snap back”. An expression I have been bombarded with in my pregnancy, one deeply rooted in shaming mothers for looking like mothers.
All of this to say, my identity - the one revolving around my looks - completely shattered this morning. And it was about goddamn time. My true self, the one that relaxes when I speak the truth to it, doesn’t care about whether or not I will have a “mommy pooch” postpartum because of this self-diagnosed Diastasis Recti. She cares about the unbelievable blessing she gets to meet in a few months. She cares about motherhood, the one role she’s been looking forward to inhibiting since the moment she understood life.
But there’s a battle. One between her, my true self, and the warped one that’s been molded and programmed into thinking her worth relies on the way she looks and the ways she chooses to present herself to a world that encourages you to strip yourself of anything authentic if it doesn’t align with systems put in place centuries ago.