It is what it is

There’s nothing like pregnancy, childbirth, and a birthday ending in 0 or 5 (I’ll let you guess which) to get you thinking about your body. I’m months out from giving birth to my second child, and it’s safe to say my body has been on a journey.

We live in a society, and I believe a particular historical moment, which both encourages child bearing, and yet is also outwardly disgusted by what it does to women’s bodies. We are expected to grow children (that fertility crisis isn’t going to fix itself), then return to the same bodies we had not even before pregnancy, but almost before puberty. That is, if you’re a white woman. Women of colour are faced with an even worse lot, neither encouraged to have children nor given understanding for the changes it can bring about.

I am hesistant to name specific women, because I don’t think any one person can really shape or confront this cultural trend. But the discussion – indeed outright praise – around Margot Robbie’s post partum body during the Wuthering Heights press tour felt emblematic of the pressures facing women in our society. You must have children, but that fact must be invisible on your body.

This makes me angry. Misogyny is seemingly on the rise, or at least more in the open than it once seemed to be, and women’s bodies are once again being targeted and used against us. We’re being asked, told, to feel inadequate, to spend our time and resources seeking a kind of perfection it takes teams of people and great financial freedom to achieve. The noise is getting louder, and, so society says, we have to listen.

And yet, I have never felt more comfortable with my body. My silly little/big body is a tryer. All our bodies are. No matter whether they can do exactly what we ask of them in the moment, they’re always trying. My heart is beating all day every day, my lungs push beautiful oxygen around a system which is working for one goal and one goal only: keep going. I’ve experienced enough grief to not take this for granted.

Sure, there are times I’m frustrated by my body’s inabilities. If only my immune system were that bit better, my joints that bit stronger. But that can never take away from all that my body does achieve. It has done big things and small things for me: created life, and helped make a life I have wanted for myself.

Over the years, we’ve had our disagreements, my body and I. But when it comes down to it, we’re a team. We change together, grow together, expand and retract together, get softer and harder together. The fact is, I love my body, because it loves me.