Katie Holmes Cruise--Post-Baby BodyFrom the title of this post you may be able to guess what I think of that phrase, so much in the pop culture news these days, "post-baby bodies". For those who manage to avoid pop-culture, which is probably better for your health, what is being referred to here is the taut, hard, flat stomach, no hips, lean bodies that young actresses who have just had babies display to their friends/enemies, the Paparazzi, the fans, the public. Proudly they walk to their cars, babies in the most expensive strollers and or front packs and or nannies arms, bellies bare, their new, larger breasts are showing mondo cleavage, and they look just the way they were 9 months ago or possibly even better. People, Us Weekly, Entertainment Tonight, E! cameras are clicking away and the reporters from all of the above are shrieking at viewers about the incredible, mind-boggling, magical, fantastical fact that the actresses "post-baby bodies" are better than could ever be imagined!!!!!!!! "How do they do it?", they rapturously implore.
I am tired of hearing about PBBs because my experience was drastically different. My post-baby body was at least 20 pounds heavier with the first child and it went up exponentially with each successive birth. After the first baby, 45 years ago, I lost about 15 of those pounds. After the second baby, 2 1/2 years later, I lost 10 of those pounds. (Can you see the pattern emerging?) After the last baby, 32 years ago, I lost maybe 10 pounds. If you can do elementary math you can see that I never returned to my pre-baby weight. No fans, magazines, TV entertainment shows or paparazzi would have been agitated in their desire to extoll the virtues of my ability to return to my fabulous, taut, hard shape!
The thing is--I was a regular person, who had regular child-raising chores to do in a regular suburban household with a regular husband who required regular meals and regularly washed clothes and a regularly vacuumed and scrubbed house. And the other thing is--in my time of child rearing, the 60s, 70s, 80s, the figures in the public eye who had children did so behind closed doors. They did not emerge until many, many months after their children were born and they did not wear midriff baring fashions in those days, therefore we didn't see whether they had achieved pre-baby tautness or not, nor I think, did we care. The magazines showed pictures of them IN BED with their newborns, swathed in lacy bed jackets, cradling their adorable infants, looking down at them lovingly. In those days I think we would have been okay with Elizabeth Taylor or Debbie Reynolds or Sophia Loren being a little heavier than they were before. After all, we were. In fact, we were ALL heavier, rounder and softer than the crop of actresses now in the public eye.
I wonder if young mothers today, watching Nicole, Angelina, Gwyneth, Madonna, Katie, et.al., think that they must achieve this same level of firmness within days of having their babies. I wonder if they understand how these star mothers do it. I am not in on all the details of the diets, purges and other intra-intestinal fat burning iradications these girls go through, but I am sure there are hundreds of them, not to mention the hours sweating at the gym.
What is it in our rabid pop culture today that wants the young new star mothers, to look exactly the same as they did before gestation and birth? What is it that craves a much less than mother-like physique? Why is it that the only curves allowed these girls are breasts and that those breasts be augmented and not be used to suckle the infant that has just emerged from that same woman, who just months before was flaunting her "baby bump". Is it a matter of "Look at me! Look how incredible I am that I can have a huge pregnancy and then bounce back into shape with a snap of my fingers! Am I not Superwoman?" Not only is it not true that it happened with a snap of the fingers, it is also not true that it is normal. I speculate that if these young stars did NOT bounce back that they would become fodder for the media in an entirely different way.
Witness what the media jackals did to Britney Spears when she didn't come out of pregnancy with her abs intact. How did they treat her when she said she wanted another child right away? Did any of you miss the pictures that were taken of her belly hanging over the tops of her low-riding jeans and the nasty commentary that went along with it? How could you have missed it in the line at the grocery store with the tabloids, and pseudo-reputable magazines right next to them, all showing Britney looking like a regular person who has just given birth. Can you imagine what it must be like for these girl/mothers?
So here we have the media demanding that our new crop of star mothers come out of childbirth looking as though someone else carried their babies and we have our young women in this country watching all this on their iPhones, computers, magazines, online. What kind of body image problems are we going to see? When women cultural icons became extremely thin we saw teenagers falling into anorexia and bulemia. Those were teenagers, not yet having babies. What is going to happen, what kind of pressure is occurring right now, that will impact new mothers that aren't stars? How much depression, added onto the normal post-partum depression, will follow if young women believe that they must achieve their pre-baby bodies?
I don't envy either the star mothers or the non-star mothers. There is so much pressure in this world to look young. There are so many body image problems that all people grow up with. Media is becoming so all-pervading in all our lives. It is only in my 60s that I finally can say "screw it" to cultural ecstasy about thinness and youth. But can these young women stop listening, stop watching, stop emulating? It's doubtful and it's dangerous.
