I am horrible at being pregnant.  I don’t glow. I sweat, and huff and puff and moan and my face breaks out. I look like a pizza which has been dropped and driven over. It’s not pretty, I don’t give off that ‘earthy mother’ aura that some lovely pregnant women emit. My aura is more of a gentle psycho bitch thing. I always wanted to be the beautiful happy mum-to-be in the singlet and sweats, with that adorable little belly button that pokes out. But with the sweat, the pimples, the enormous ass (I swear I grow my babies in my backside. Maybe my uterus is in the wrong place….) the huffing and the god-awful gas it’s pretty obvious it was just was never meant to be.

It’s a shame really. If there is any time that one should feel at their most beautiful and most womanly it should be when they are pregnant. Weight doesn’t matter when you’re pregnant, because you’re not fat! You’re growing a little person. Growing eyebrows on a little person can be exhausting! (Damn if those eyebrows don’t make you hungry. Next time you’ve scarfed an entire pizza blame it on the eyebrows.)

Before I had kids I was a little bit fat but I was pretty. (Gasp, oh ye’ Internets that someone has dared to confess that they don’t think they look like the spawn of satan.  I’ll wait for you pick up your jaw). The ironic thing was that I was never happy with how I looked in my pre-kid body. I always felt awkward. I have no sense for fashion, I’m not at all adventurous with makeup or hair styles. Looking at other women girls my age I always felt as though I was the odd one out. I was the plain Jane, not anything special. I never had that moment where I walked by a mirror and thought ‘Hey! Looking good today!”

My three kids wrecked my body. I can’t drink a lot of wine any more because wine makes me very sleepy. Being very sleepy means that I might pee on myself in the middle of the night because my bladder control is ridiculous. All the keegels in the world haven’t, and won’t fix me. I have stretch marks that make me look like a backpackers map of Asia and varicose veins that even my doctor was horrified by. {Side Note: My husband is a lucky man.}

All of that, all of this means that I am not feeling sexy. My husband tells me I’m hot, and I roll my eyes at him, and crack the shits because we forked out hundreds on his glasses and prescription sunnies and clearly the man is still blind as a bat.

AND THEN….

I did something so out of character.

I bought a sexy bra.

There is something about that one, single item of clothing that suddenly made me feel like maybe, just maybe under all of my physical imperfections and distaste about the shape, size and sprawling landscape of my body that there might be something….. desirable.

Some days I wake up and I wish that I had a nice corporate job where I was required to dress up. A job that would make me get out of bed, put on makeup and do my hair nicely. A job where heels are required, and joggers are banned. The truth is, I love my job and at the moment I wouldn’t trade it for anything (except a winning lotto ticket) but realistically I wake up in the morning and change out of my “Mum PJ’”s into my “Mum uniform” and when I get home at night I change into my “mum jeans and hoodie.” Even those at work who don’t have kids all look like Mum’s because essentially, that’s what my job is doing. While the Mum’s go to work, we step in and care for these kids. We nurture them, we cuddle them, we dry their tears and put band aids on their bumps and grazes. We sing songs, pat to sleep and play silly games. We dress like Mums’ because in a small way for a few hours a day that’s what we are.

BUT I’M ALREADY A MUM. And wearing the ‘mum’ clothes, day in day out had stripped every ounce of ‘sexy’ from me.

I was so humiliated to walk into that store, in my ‘mum clothes’ and buy that sexy bra. Honestly, I felt like a teenaged boy who had just been caught with a crusty sock and a dirty magazine. I picked it up and put it down about ten times before I finally gave myself a stern talking to and made myself go through the check out. What is it about buying one piece of underwear that scared the crap out of me?

If I look deep down inside myself it’s because I’ve always been insecure about the way I look. For all my strength in other areas, in dealing with grief, in managing and juggling commitments and relationships, in supporting the people I care about, my biggest insecurity about other people and myself is that people will look at me and think I’m ugly. That I’m being called fat, that my husband won’t want to have sex with me because I’m not that pretty young woman he fell in love with years ago. I see people posting about being proud of their stretch marks, of their post baby bodies and I just don’t get it. Not because I don’t think they are amazing, but because I am ashamed of, embarrassed about, and don’t like, my own body. 

A few weeks ago I stepped out of the shower, put on a bra that I had been terrified to buy and took a long hard look at myself in the mirror. Did I like what I saw? Truthfully, No.

But I didn’t hate it.

And for me in this year of learning about myself, about who I am and who I want to be, that was one massive step in the right direction.