Pregnancy heralds the inaugural life chapter called “paying way more attention to someone else’s body than your own.” That double pink line is like a starting pistol to the next months of scouring books, articles and apps for lessons on what is happening to the body rapidly growing inside of you: how it is developing, feeling and moving; what best to feed it; and how best to ensure it becomes a MENSA member/president/astronaut/cancer-cure discoverer.
I was fairly prepared for understanding how my baby was developing and how, in turn, my own body would be changing along with him in the process, but what I was not prepared for was the litany of truly bizarre, silly and downright uncomfortable bodily changes that occur immediately postpartum.
“During the postpartum time, some of the things that I see make a big difference in physical recovery begin with expectations and prenatal planning, such as giving oneself adequate time for rest/recovery and not trying to bounce back too quickly post-birth, excellent nutrition tailored to postpartum wellness and bodywork/mother-roasting treatments,” doula Becca Gordon, who has attended over 200 births and counseled 100 families with postpartum support, tells SheKnows.
Here is what pop culture ensures we all dread as a result of childbirth: weight gain impervious to diet and exercise, stretch marks evocative of a tiger’s coat and a besieged vagina only Elastigirl would recognize.
The following is a list of what they don’t tell you might happen — every last one of these has either happened to me or to various women I know.
Leaky Breasts
I’ll never forget recording an important voice-over job in a room with 10 other actors just three months postpartum feeling a tightening sensation in my breast and looking down to see an enormous circle of breast milk fan outward on my tight white Breton stripe shirt. Just one massive, lopsided mammary crop circle.
I had promised myself my style wouldn’t change postpartum, but I quickly realized why baggy, dark-colored “mom-wear” is a thing — it’s to disguise the literal pints of liquid that can come barreling out of one end of your body or another at any given moment, uninvited and generally unwelcome.
Changing Nipple Shapes
Once you’ve finished nursing, you may find that your breasts have completely changed — you might suddenly find yourself an A cup when you’ve lived your pre-baby life as a C cup, or you might find, as a few friends of mine have attested, that your nipples are a completely different shape. Several friends of mine referred to their areolae as looking triangular, which is a fun new way to teach shapes to your kid.
Night Sweats
Your body is still working in overdrive postpartum, especially if you’re nursing. The metabolic uptick from breastfeeding makes you feel as though you’re almost always wrapping up a CrossFit class, including in your sleep, which makes sense, because the average person who nurses uses up more energy than someone who isn't breastfeeding.
Body Odor
Body odors, of course, can smell so wildly different, but after a lifetime of yours, you know its scent, as I knew mine. Then all of a sudden, the day we brought our son home from the hospital, it was like smelling someone else’s smell. My body’s olfactory aggression has quieted in the last few months, but body odor in general is much stronger postpartum, especially for those that are still nursing. One lucky friend reported that after her first delivery, her body odor disappeared completely but three years later, the second child returned it, which is assuredly the rudest birthday gift of all time.
Feet Size
Your feet swell with pregnancy, sure, but they can also actually change sizes. It’s not uncommon to go up a full size or two in pregnancy and either stay that way in perpetuity or take over a year to return to their previous size. Upside here: mandatory shoe shoppin', which honestly makes this the most desirable of all possible corporeal consequences of childbirth.
Emotional Changes
Postpartum depression is a well-documented effect of childbirth, but I was completely unprepared for the emotional roller coaster that occurs four to seven days postpartum when the estrogen and progesterone make a mass exodus from your body and leave you, in a word, weeping.
These “baby blues” are mercifully temporary but feel as though life has utterly upended and will never be the same. Watch out for car commercials especially — the thought of your new family dying in a car crash will play on a loop in your head. Welcome to motherhood! TV is different now.
Nicole Makowka, a licensed marriage and family therapist and the therapeutic director and lead educator at LOOM, a space for reproductive empowerment in Los Angeles, addresses these emotional changes. “The first few months postpartum are full of new changes, new experiences and a huge shift in identity," she tells SheKnows. "Incorporating some self-care care strategies can help support new parents in this phase of transition. Ask for help right when you feel like you need it — in this stage, mobilize your community. People want to help. Think of it in this way: 'I have two tasks to do: One, ask for help. Two, take the help.'”
Incontinence
Yet another thing you don’t have to wait for the winter of your life to experience: According to UCLA Health, nearly half of women experience urinary incontinence after childbirth.
“In my practice, I commonly have women who are surprised that their pelvic floor just doesn’t feel the same,” women’s health physical therapist Allison Oswald tells SheKnows. "I explain to them that it’s not the same — tissue is stretched, there is often scar tissue — but now more than ever they have a chance to reconnect to this part of their body, understand how it functions and ensure it is working properly for bowel, bladder and sexual function.”
Carrying the weight of a human baby around in your pelvis for nearly a year does quite a weakening number on pelvic floor muscles, the muscles that support the bladder, bowel and uterus. Now, in exercise classes, you won’t just sweat profusely, you will also pee.
Hemorrhoids
These often pop up (sorry) in the third trimester or in childbirth and then never leave. A specialist can rid you of them, or you can embrace this new rectal houseguest, ascribe it a name and move on.
Skin Tags
One of the most surprising — and low-key creepiest — changes to my body during and after pregnancy was in the form of skin tags. Benign, tiny skin tags on my armpits, of all places. Thanks, hormones!
Bleeding
If you deliver your child with a vaginal birth, you will bleed for weeks on end postpartum. I was expecting maybe a week of bleeding, but it ended up being six full weeks of bleeding, three weeks of which were like the heaviest period days, replete with frightening horror flick clots.
Teeth Gap
Your body experiences a surge in the protein hormone relaxin while pregnant, which relaxes the pelvic ligaments in preparation for childbirth. The thing is, it doesn’t just relax the pelvic ligaments — it relaxes everything and can even change your teeth structure. Childbirth gave one of my friends a front tooth gap the likes of which she hadn’t seen since she was 12 before she got braces.
Hunger
I kept cookies and trail mix on my nightstand for the first month postpartum because I would wake up shaking with an almost comical voracious hunger. If you thought you were hungrier than normal in pregnancy, you will be doubly hungry postpartum thanks to your body’s need for even more calories for milk production, given you burn 300 to 500 additional calories per day.
Hair Loss
You don’t just lose your hair in the winter of your life; you lose it in your fecund prime too. The increase in estrogen during pregnancy essentially freezes hair so that it doesn’t fall out as it normally does — resulting in the thick, abundant hair that is associated with pregnancy. With the hormone drop postpartum comes the accompanying loss of hair, and the body makes up for lost time by losing it in droves — sometimes in alarming clumps. This hair-loss phase is usually done by six months postpartum but can sometimes last up to a year.
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