Immature Attraction To Your Hot Body
I was talking about this idea when my husband and I went for a walk the other night
Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we talk about how my husband’s view of my body changed the way I saw myself.
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Immature Attraction To Your Hot Body
I like reading what other mothers say about our lot in life. Do they see it as this great adventure and blessing as I do? It’s like a reinforcing exercise. I go in wondering if they’ll hate it, only to find that almost all of them see the fruits of their labor blooming in the most amazing ways. Everything we do, no matter how difficult or mundane, is worth it in the end.
As I was reading Tea and Books’s latest essay, “An exhausted pronatalist mother’s message for the childless woman,” I was struck by her summation of how single women argue against motherhood. I’ve heard every bit of it.
“They get to relax, live the easy life, they get to keep their hot bodies, unlike we motherfolk,” she wrote, characterizing the arguments childless women make to talk themselves out of being mothers.
And while I can sympathize with the longing for relaxation and an easy life, I’ve never understood the idea of desperately holding on to being hot. It’s not that I and the other mothers I know ignore our changing bodies or don’t want to “bounce back” after our pregnancies. We just don’t look at our changing bodies in the same way we did before.
I was talking about this idea when my husband and I went for a walk the other night. The Caller’s Amber Duke wrote her newsletter about this new trend in plastic surgery where they take cadaver fat and inject it into women’s butts and breasts. He was floored. The idea is so grotesque.
“Who would ever want that?” he just kept saying.
One thing led to another, and our conversation eventually led to him asking me if I ever thought about getting plastic surgery. I admitted that there was a time when I wanted to get what they call a mommy makeover. He was obviously shocked. So I started giving a million explanations. I’ve had hard deliveries. All four of our girls came by emergency C-section. There’s scarring and scar tissue that I want fixed. I want you to want me. Blah. Blah. Blah.
When I thought I had explained my vapidness away, he said something I’ll never forget: “Why would you want to erase the physical reminders of your victories?” I had never really thought about it like that. It’s been more of a feeling that this is what my body looks like, and there is nothing I can do about it, without going through a painful procedure. (Which I do not want to do.)