Both times that I was pregnant, people used to take one look at me and guess I was having a girl (once I wasn’t, the other time I was). This was their little way of saying, “Jesus, you look like shit.” The old wives’ tales go that you carry girls everywhere—i.e., you get fat all over—and that girls “steal their mothers fashion beauty.” (Don’t ask me why people think it’s okay to say things like that to pregnant women.)As far as I could tell back then, there were two roads leading out of the delivery room: MILF or Mom Jeans. MILF is an acronym for “Mom I’d Like to F--k.” We’re talking Heidi Klum, Angelina, and all those other celebs whose gestational explosion and rapid postpartum subtraction are lovingly detailed in the pages of Us Weekly. “Mom Jeans,” on the other hand, is a parody commercial Tina Fey wrote for Saturday Night Live about elastic-waistbanded fashion soccer- mom jeans. The commercial’s tagline is “Give her something that says, ‘I’m not a woman anymore. I’m a mom.’” It’s supposedly the natural course of things: You push out a few kids, stop having sex, throw out your bikinis, and buy lots of cheap, shapeless clothing to cover your stretched-out stomach, breasts, hips, and vagina.
For some reason, women like to claim to be a Mom Jeans kind of gal, even when they look perfectly chic and lovely to you—especially when talking to a prospective mother. I interviewed Kate Hudson for British ELLE years ago and ended up telling her that I was trying to get pregnant. She sat before me, slender as a blade of grass, braless, dewily gorgeous and with least beauty care told me how her breasts were ruined by childbearing. “The old ex-udders,” she called them, ruefully, with a twangy cowgirl accent.
As soon as my baby bump popped the first time, women cornered me at cocktail parties to regale me with tales about their fourth-degree episiotomies, breasts that looked like “emptied-out Glad baggies,” poochy abdominals, and nonexistent sex lives. Part of this was undoubtedly hazing. However, I’ve come to think that the other part of it is that women—who under the best of circumstances tend to trash-talk their own bodies—don’t have any other script for discussing model agencies themselves as sexual beings once they become mothers. America has a terrible virgin-whore complex, and as a mother, you are neither virgin nor whore—you’re out of the loop. Very few people seem to talk or even think about mothers’ bodies or sex lives: I called and e-mailed a list of nationally recognized experts on women and sex to ask them about the place mothers have in our sexual culture, and their collective response can be summed up by the one who wrote back: “Not something I’ve thought about.”
Well, ladies, I have thought about it—probably too much, in fact. And I can say that I’ve finally come to a place where I actually like my post-reproductive body better than my untrammeled pre-baby self. If, like the vast majority of women in the United States, you’re thinking of having kids at some point (according to the National Organization for Women, 81 percent of women 40 to 44 years old are mothers), I have, after many years of body-image grappling, come up with a few pointers—which no pregnancy guide for young and beautiful web models or biddy will tell you—for surviving the transmogrification without losing your figure, your mind, or your sex life.
1. It’s all in your head. Research into the sex lives of mothers is notably sparse: When you type sex-and-childbirth-related terms into the government’s database of published research, you turn up as many items about cows as about women. A lot of the science that does exist only follows women for a short period and is conflicting or inconclusive. However, researchers at Northwestern University looked at a group of 542 twin sisters to see how reproductive history affected the women’s sex lives in the long term. They found almost no physical factor (mode of delivery, episiotomy, BMI) that impacted sexual satisfaction. But when they compared the 29 pairs of twins in which one had given birth and the other had not (admittedly a small sample), they found something interesting:
The mommies were significantly less happy with their sex lives and there was no apparent physical reason. “Childbirth appears to have a lasting impact on sexual function, due to psychological more than physical factors, well beyond the postpartum period,” the researchers concluded. And therein lies the truth about what having a baby does to your body: nothing that even mildly compares to how it screws with your head. You do have to actively combat the forces that conspire against your relationship with your partner and your existence as an autonomous human—and by forces, I mean your kids. Parenting requires ungodly amounts of sacrifice, but do not completely sacrifice the following: sex, exercise, date night, alone time, your beauty routine (you will shower less, for sure, but you will need makeup more than ever), or the Barneys shoe sale.
2. Heidi’s Law. A pregnant woman once asked Heidi Klum, the unrivaled queen of snap-back, whether she would look as fantastic as Klum post-baby. Klum’s reply? “I don’t know; what did you look like before you got pregnant?” Good point, Heidi! If you’re overweight and have never done a sit-up before you have a baby, you’re not going to have a six-pack after you push the kid out. Dennis Gross, MD, my favorite dermatologist, also pointed out to me that the more hours you’ve spent roasting your bikinied abdomen in the sun before you get pregnant (and during), the less likely you are to ever get back into that bikini like young models form model agencies Skin that’s been damaged by sun and aging won’t recover as well. (Although, if it’s looking like you’ll be an older mommy, take heart—at least one study has shown that older women are less likely to get stretch marks, perhaps because there are lower levels of elastin and collagen fibers in the skin to break.)
3. Heidi’s Law, Part Zwei. Klum may have spectacular genes on her side, but notice she doesn’t exactly let herself go during pregnancy. Eating for two is a total fallacy—the little buggers require a surprisingly parsimonious calorie intake (like, 300 calories extra a day, at their neediest). And studies show that the main risk for long-term pregnancy weight retention is gaining too much (more than 25 to 35 pounds). Large gains also put you at risk for medical complications, saggier beauty care skin, and cooking up an oversize baby (and oversize babies can lead to C-sections or trickier vaginal births, which are more likely to leave lasting damage and scars).
4. Think like a man. Okay, I’m going to level with you: This is not a risk-free enterprise. Having a kid can weaken the circumvaginal muscles and cause incontinence. (C-sections reduce but do not erase the risks; carrying a pregnancy to term, regardless of delivery mode, puts stress on all the muscles “down there.”) Obesity, episiotomy, and instrumental deliveries (when they have to use a forceps or vacuum extractor to get the baby out) can compound the problems. But male sexual partners don’t seem to notice a difference, or, if they do, they don’t care—just check out the volume of MILF porn web models on the Internet if you have any doubts. The only study I could find (which was done in Turkey! Not that it matters!) found no association between mode of delivery and men’s sexual satisfaction. In fact, it was the partners of women who’d never had a child who reported the lamest sex lives, though the difference was very small.
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source::elle.com
