An Athlete's Pregnancy, Part 7: Postpartum

It’s been many months since I have gotten to properly work out. Like push my body, sweaty and high on endorphins working out. Whose idea was it to stack late pregnancy, birth and then postpartum back to back to back? Someone should really work an off-week in there somewhere. In the early weeks after giving birth, when I felt like I was drowning in blood, sweat and breast milk, I told myself: “just get to 6 weeks.” I had heard from countless sources that the magic 6 week mark is when everything would change: I would go back to having sex, my baby would turn a sleep corner and, most importantly, I would be able to exercise. And, of course, when you tell an athlete she’s going to be able to exercise, she thinks: Super. I’ll go for a 30 minute run, or an hour long bike ride, or I’ll fire my gym membership back up and start a simple program. Just something easy to get back on track.

I was at my 6 week appointment when the midwife told me she was going to check my pelvic floor. She stuck her fingers up my vaginal canal and instructed me to do a kegel (contract my pelvic floor muscles). I was clenching as hard as I could when she said, “Okay, whenever you’re ready, do it!”

Insert melting emoji.

I didn’t need that appointment to know that I wasn’t ready to go for a run. Everything felt weak and my pelvic floor hurt when I walked more than 20 minutes. My breasts were constantly full of milk and so heavy I couldn’t imagine trying to move at a pace quicker than a stroll. Everything still felt so soft and sore and heavy and sweaty and clingy. Also, I feel like it doesn’t really hit until you do it, but the baby cannot be left alone like… ever?

It has been a crazy bind. In some ways, I need to work out more than I ever have in my life. Working out helps me regulate my moods and my sleep, both of which could seriously use some regulating during the postpartum period. I desperately want to feel more at home in my body. I want to feel strong. I want to be able to strap my baby to me and go for long rambling hikes, feeding her on the path like a beautiful hippie goddess. At the same time, I have very little energy to work out, and working out doesn’t bring even close to the same level of goodness and relief that it once did. It leaves me feeling sore in places I’ve never felt sore, sticky, smelly and exhausted. As an athlete, it’s demoralizing to have working out, even a little bit, feel like slogging through mud. Oftentimes it feels not worth it. When I have a moment to myself, all I want to do is sleep. Or just be by myself. Firing up to do tiny amounts of exercise feels bad not only physically, but also it makes me feel guilty.

We talk a lot about the pressure to bounce back after pregnancy, but in my experience, there is now a sneaky new pressure that is a confusing mix of empowering and insidious. This pressure is to not bounce back, and instead embrace your new, squishy body without making any changes (empowering, perhaps). But it also comes with an unwritten message that a desire to change your new mom bod is selfish and unnecessary (insidious). The messaging is that your body now belongs to your baby and whatever the baby needs (or society or social media tell you the baby needs) comes first. If the baby needs you to never leave in order to exercise, you never leave. If the baby refuses to be handed over to your partner so you can do PT exercises, or shower, or poop, you let that baby velcro herself to your body.

The sacrifices that I felt like I was expected to make during pregnancy pale in comparison to the sacrificial expectations that American society has for new mothers. Wanting things for myself, and especially wanting my bodily autonomy back, feels selfish. I have the most loving and supportive husband of anyone I know, and I still feel wracked with guilt when he spends a long time looking after our daughter alone. She feels like my responsibility, and that the correct thing for me to be doing is destroying my physical and mental well-being on her behalf. As a retired athlete, there’s no longer a financial reason why my body can’t belong solely to my baby. I was talking to my sister in law about how hard it’s been to transfer the baby from sleeping on me to sleeping on another surface. She replied, “But where do you need to go?”

I thought I would be really changed, as a person, by motherhood. Turns out I’m the same person that I was before. I still have insomnia (Truly unfortunate. Many nights my baby sleeps better than I do.) and a bottomless well of patience for mundanely hard and boring activities (just as useful for baby caring as it was for rowing or riding bikes). I love my baby fiercely and protectively, and some days all I want to do is snuggle her head into my neck and hold onto her. I also still want to be strong, and fast, and feel good in my body. I want my body. Period. And more than anything, I don’t want my love and care for my daughter to feel like a sacrifice: I want it to feel like a choice. Before having our daughter, my husband and I said, “We don’t want our lives to change. We’re just going to bring her along to whatever we do!” This is a classic saying only ever said by people who have never had children. Of course our lives have changed. How could they not when there is a whole new person living in them? But my body hasn’t stopped belonging to me.

Say it with me: your body doesn’t belong to your baby.

I hope that I can teach my daughter that her body belongs to her alone. I hope I can teach her lessons about autonomy and consent, about power and possibility. I hope if she ever decides to have a child, that she will get to feel all of the magic that comes with being able to create life in and with her body, and less of the guilt that comes from protecting what’s hers. Because while she may be my daughter, she’ll never belong to me. She’s already a powerful, independent woman in the making, and, as the kids say, I love that for her.