Some thoughts on my 'big ole squishy belly'

On mom-pooches and comfort (before the luteal phase tries to ruin it)

Via Kaboompics.com on Pexels

Welcome to Delightfully Difficult! My name is Allison and I write about motherhood, midlife, and everything in-between. If you’re a regular here or felt this post resonated, I’d love for you to consider sharing, liking, or subscribing.

---

“I love your big ole squishy belly!”

The first time he said it, I was a little taken aback, not sure where it was coming from, but then I remembered that just minutes before I was standing in front of a mirror, thinking (in my head) about how bloated I was, running my hands in circles over my stretch-marked stomach in an effort to calm it the eff down.

And while I’d like to say I’m evolved and that the comment didn’t phase me, I am also a woman who went to high school in the late 90’s, who came of age during a time when heroin chic was in, when protruding hip and collar bones were all the rage.

And for a time, I had both. Not a long time, mind you, but there was a brief time in my early 20’s when I lived on cigarettes, Stouffer’s Mac and cheese, scorpion bowls, and other questionable life choices, a time when my hair seemed to be falling out more than it should and things in life were not going well. It was incredibly unhealthy, not that I’ve mastered how to be healthy yet, but it was my way of dealing with things, so there I was.

Aside from the intermittent years when I actively treated my body like crap, however, I have spent most of my life in what the BMI would tell me is overweight, hugging either the low end or the high end, depending on the year.¹ And for almost all of those years, I would have told you I had a healthy approach to how I saw and accepted my body.

Or at least that’s what I thought until the last two years or so because it turns out, spending a lot of time crying in closets because clothes didn’t fit or because I didn’t recognize myself and hated what I saw was….. not normal?

Also not normal was that I didn’t wear shorts for years because I have cellulite, which of course meant I wouldn’t be caught dead in a bathing suit without shorts, a less than ideal situation for someone growing up in Florida where it’s broiling hot or Wilmington, NC, a stone’s throw from the beach (although the humidity was great for my hair, not that I knew how to style it then).

So yeah, maybe I’d internalized some of that messaging from my youth, after all.²

//

Flash forward to more than a decade later, a decade in which these behaviors continued unchecked because I assumed I was just being a woman in America, I became a mom and it…. got easier?

Perhaps it’s because I had my son a few weeks into lockdown and no one was going to see my body, but there was no expectation that I “bounce back”. There was no post-baby wardrobe update, just bulk leggings purchases and undiagnosed postpartum depression.

Or maybe it was because I had a mom-pooch long before I was a mom, only now I had a justification for having the body that I did.

Or perhaps it was because I also knew in my gut that I’d be getting divorced, and I stopped thinking about my body in terms of how other people would react to it and just stopped giving af.³

And once I stopped thinking of my body in terms of how other people would react to it, things began to shift. Not all at once, but over time, and I have no doubt it was in large part due to a combination of all of the above.

The divorce because, well, frankly I was just done with centering men as a general practice and if I’m being honest, removing men from my purview of consideration is pretty damned freeing.⁴

I also did not emerge from my divorce eager to date (I wrote about this here) and with majority custody, there are not many nights on the town. Plus, I work from home most of the time, so rarely do I need to dress to impress, which means when I do dress up, I usually feel like a rockstar because I’m not in goblin mode.

And, of course, the pandemic because for more than a year, the little voice in my head telling me that I had to look a certain way quieted, my ability to remain cocooned at home a great way to come to terms with my new post-baby body without the noise of the outside world, the real or perceived glances at my midsection, the judgement that may or may not have existed.

Yes, I was being live-streamed for all to see week after week, but only from the chest up (and I was off-camera for a lot of it because I was holding an infant), so it was fairly low pressure, given the lifetime of low standards I had set for myself re: makeup.

In that time, the only thing that mattered was that my body did the things it needed to do to keep up with my son, and it did. It does.

//

Which is not to say I don’t have plenty of days where I struggle with how I look⁵, it’s just that those struggles have morphed into more of an annoyance than a full breakdown on the bathroom floor and when I do breakdown in tears and hate everything about myself, it’s more likely because I am late thanks to time-blindness and I’m frustrated with myself and not about what I actually look like.

And that comment about my big ole squishy belly?

It came from my son, who is 4, and the next words out of his mouth were, “Can I lay on it while you read me a story?”.

Because for him, squishy means comfort.

It means connection.

It means a soft place to rest his head while we chat about what’s on our minds.

And really, with that in mind, who doesn’t want a squishy belly?

---

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please consider subscribing, as it’s very much appreciated.

1. The BMI is problematic in terms of determining health outcomes but it’s what I’ve got for a reference point given the metrics and expectations at the time.

2. I hesitate to use the term body dysmorphia when describing my experiences because I have watched people I love struggle with the multitudes of layers that come with that and I don’t want to diminish those experiences.

3. This was, to be fair, all in my head. At no point in my 14 years with my ex-husband did he ever make me feel bad about my body size or weight. I can’t even think of a time where he ever made a comment about somebody else’s weight, never mind mine. I write a lot about the challenges of divorce here on Delightfully Difficult but this was simply not a thing I had to contend with, which I recognize is pretty great. I can only imagine how many more closets I would have cried in if I was also facing passive aggressive comments about it at home.

4. I do wonder whether I’d be more self-conscious if I had to people more often, or if I was interested in dating, whether this whatever-approach is confidence or the result of my old stand-by, defiance, or of opting out, but if it’s a result of defiance or opting out then I’d have to dig into how much of my view of my physical self is wrapped up in the opinions of others, particularly men, and that’s just not a road I want to go down today. Perhaps I’ll dig into this more in another essay….

5. I question whether I’ll ever get to a point where I don’t struggle with this on some level, but in the grand scheme of things, I can see how things have improved over time and for that, I am grateful.