Hello. I come to you this morning from the little balcony outside my apartment. Lately, I’ll come out here for a few minutes at a time, just to look up and feel the sun warm my face. Adam and I had lunch at a restaurant the other day (!) with friends (!!!) and it felt disproportionately good to feel the cool metal of the chair on my bare shoulders and the reverberation of all our glasses clinking as we cheers-ed to science and vaccines and summer. I’d forgotten how affirming those tiny interactions with other people, with the world can be. Like the way you inhale another person when you hug them closely or the hot flush of laughing too hard at an inside joke—all the best parts of having a body and existing in this world.
It occurred to me that I’m going to need some practice at it, though, this business being out in the world with my body and feeling comfortable in it, at ease with my own style of being. Not just because of this past year, but also because: new motherhood, which has taken me out of my body more than any experience ever has. There are the obvious things, like swollen ankles and the alienating way a pregnant belly button inverts. Even more striking, though, is the way those things changed how I’ve always understood myself: as a person who has agency over my body, and who often does things solely for its pleasure and benefit.
That feeling of agency and ease doesn’t return postpartum, either. Not only for obvious reasons (leaky boobs anyone?) and because you can’t grab after-work drinks and stay out too late on a random Tuesday. But also because: are you even someone who enjoys staying out late now that falling asleep at 9:30 most nights feels really, really great? But also because: your go-to outfit for such an occasion no longer fits. And also: none of your back-up outfits really feel like “you” anymore, so what (in theory) would you actually wear out to a bar on a random Tuesday anyway, not that you’re even going out in the first place….
It’s in those postpartum moments, that theoretical exercise of picturing what exactly my life is at this moment and how I will dress for it, that I realized: there is no “getting your body back.” I mean that abstractly, of course. Though thank god we are starting to realize the physical cruelty in that rhetoric. What I’m trying to say is, there is no going back to the version of yourself when your body existed just for you. Some parts of this new relationship are intensely physical (breastfeeding) and others are more subtle, like that gut instinct to throw out a hand and catch my child when she teeters from her center of balance. Either way, I’m realizing, my physical reality will now always include her.
Even after eighteen months of motherhood, my body still feels unfamiliar to me in many ways. I’m not sure how much of this is due to being quarantined for more than a year (I hear no one else’s pants fit either, by the way) and how much is due to the physical labor and the radical change that defines new motherhood. If I’m being honest, it’s all a blur. But one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that a little more interaction with the world will be a good thing, and that I’ve missed it, all of it.
Maybe that’s the salve, the way I (and probably so many of us, after this year) will ease back into our bodies. Those little things that can be simultaneously so mundane and life affirming—kisses on the cheek and lightly brushing by other people in a crowded room, the collective sigh of relief and accomplishment after a hard workout class, even the thick humidity from bodies sweating in close proximity to one another (though ask me about that again, once I’m back to it). I can’t wait. Meantime, I’ll take this moment to find a pair of pants (and bathing suit? entire wardrobe?) that actually fit.
