FatBrain Strikes

It started innocently enough. A friend took a snapshot of me, Kestrel, Catalina (the other baby he was playing with), and her mommy. Her mommy was gorgeous. Thin, made-up, perfect hair, generally just all-around put together. I looked like absolute hell. I was making a bad face, but.... but.... I'm fat. For the first time ever in my life, having babies has led me down the metabolic road to hell. It's not like I didn't know this was coming. I'd actually taken advantage of the presence of a scale in the home I was visiting (I don't own one, and haven't weighed myself since just after I had Kestrel) to find out the damage. The numbers aren't that bad; I weigh what I weighed before Rowan was born. Except that then, those numbers indicated a body that went to the gym for at least an hour every stinkin day and had muscles so solid that I got recruited for the gym's bodybuilding team even while 6 months pregnant with Rowan, and now they indicate a body that cleans up toddler food leavings by eating them herself. I'm wearing my pre-pregnancy clothes, too. Except for jeans, since my hips have spread and there's not a darned thing I can do about that short of wrapping myself like a mummy. If a pelvis is going to move around to let a baby out, it's never going back to the way it was before. I'm cool with that. But why, oh why, does it need to keep that extra bit of padding on top??? The female body metabolism shifts radically during nursing, so that fat reserves are held onto for dear life... the life of the baby, to be precise. When a woman's body is providing nourishment for a baby, it tends to fortify against any possible disruption of the food supply, and that means keeping fat around. So that means that evolutionarily speaking, I'm a winner. The genes for survival are there. Very little comfort, that, but there you have it. The clearest statement I can find for how culture and evolution can at times be at cross-purpose. It would help if I lived in a culture where postpartum poundage was recognized as a sign of a mother's dedication rather than a signal that she'd gone badly to seed. Alas, we worship the maiden and despise the mother and crone here in the Western World. Women with children are the #2 most ignored group of people anywhere, just behind old women. I'll never be a maiden again, and I'm good with that. I *am* a mother, I have walked that valley, I have two beautiful boys and a whole lot of good story material to show for it. I just wish that, as capable as I am of bucking society's trend in every other arena of life, I didn't recoil in horror at my own photographs. Besides the Mommy Metabolism, of course, the two key factors to personal poundage are diet and exercise. We've been flirting with a raw diet for months now, and I've been vegan for about a year, with slipups now and then for scrambled eggs and gourmet cheese. So it's not like my caloric intake is all that dramatic. I'm a fruit and veggie girl. So, very little hope for help there. It's the lack of real exercise that's killing me. Who amongst us walking the Mommy Way has time for a real workout like in the pre-mommy days? Certainly not me, not if I want to keep my domestic scene from degenerating into utter chaos. And while life with a toddler and a pre-toddler does provide opportunities for incredible activity, it's seldom the sustained activity that's required. It's usually just individual instances of heart-pounding stress, with great stretches of not much in the middle. The challenge, going forward, is acceptance. Isn't it always, though? Acceptance of my mommy body, acceptance of my time limitations, acceptance of my role as Provider of Primary Nutrition to my boyo. And in the meantime, maybe I should run around the block a few times.