Women in Philosophy: Feeling Whole: Recovering from Pregnancy and Childbirth

by Sara Protasi

On the day I am writing this post, my youngest child turns three. It’s been three years since I birthed her, and since I started the process of regaining control over my body.

This is particularly important to me, because I consider myself as much a dancer as a philosopher, even though I am only paid for doing philosophy, and even though I am a more capable philosopher than I am a dancer. What thinking of oneself as X amounts to, or consists in, or means, is not something that I am going to try and explain. That’s just how I feel. When a therapist asked me, a long time ago: “Who are you?” I didn’t know what to say. That same day I looked at the image I reflected in a mirror of my dance studio, and the answer easily popped in my head: “A dancer, that’s who I am”. And I have known that ever since.

But there is more. I am a dancer with a body that is capable of bearing children, and that has done so twice. I am also a philosopher interested in thinking about the body from a perspective informed by both gestational motherhood and dance. So, recently, I have been musing about a recent phenomenon: the affirmation of bodies “as they are”, the idea that “every body is beautiful” as it is. I have written about this phenomenon with regard to its normative implications, that is, with regard to what kind of prescriptions, rules or norms are implied by this idea. In that article, I argue that the view that every body is beautiful cannot be exclusively aesthetic, if it has to retain both its empowering and its normative meaning. Even though in my paper I focus on feminist approaches, there are many interesting variations of what we can call body positivity movement. One such variation concerns the bodies of gestational mothers.[1] There is a wealth of articles, memes, Instagram campaigns, even mantras, devoted to making mothers feel healthy and beautiful in their postpartum bodies, to help them not just tolerate, but embrace and celebrate bodily changes that are normal, both in the sense of statistically common, and of appropriate to that stage of life. The view put forth by the maternal body positivity movement is that attempts to return to a prepregnancy body as soon as possible are not only unrealistic, but also psychologically and physically damaging. In fact, many argue that such a goal is simply unachievable for most people, and that any effort in that direction is futile, and perhaps even blameworthy.

There are many intersecting topics at stake here. The pushback against expectations concerning women’s bodies originated with critiques of sexism, but has taken on a new life in discussions of fattism, transphobia and ableism: bodies of people of all genders have always been subject to narrow aesthetic standards of what counts as normal, healthy, and attractive. But the defense of mothers’ bodies also comes from quite different quarters, quarters which may even be inimical to feminism or social justice activism, and are instead closer to a religious traditional and conservative approach to motherhood. This is neither surprising nor new: hippies, feminists and religious conservatives have converged in the past on the issue of supporting nonmedicalized birth, for instance, albeit for different reasons. With regard to body positivity, too, the arguments given might be different (“God created women to give birth” versus “Down with patriarchy and the expectation that women be sexy”), but the results are the same: if a woman ends up with a pouch, with stretch marks, with sagging breasts, those are changes that should born with pride.

Now, of course, hordes of fitness trainers, nutritionists and Instagram celebrities beg to differ, and argue that mothers can, and should, work hard to regain fitness. Trainer Maria Kang exemplified this approach a few years ago, when she posted an image of herself, looking fit and surrounded by her three children under the question “What’s Your Excuse?” Many mothers reacted indignantly to the meme, finding it insulting, arrogant, and misguided. Many articles on both sides of the controversy followed, including replies from women who used to be like Kang and then “repented”.

An apparently easy solution to this kind of debate is to be pluralistic: to each mama their own post-partum philosophy. While there is some truth to that approach, there are also problems with it. Not all ideals are acceptable: some are offensive and harmful. Furthermore, personal standards are never just private, insofar as they stem from wider systems of values, and given that individual behaviors can have wide-ranging consequences. The personal is always, always political.

Take the fitness industry, which often targets new mothers and reassures them that they can get their pre-pregnancy body back, fast! Most fitness activities favored by women, such as Pilates, yoga, ballet, barre, are notoriously, and infamously, White and upper-middle class, both in terms of providers and consumers. Furthermore, it is hard to go to a fitness class without childcare, or if one is working multiple jobs. Not every post-partum injury can be fixed with the now ubiquitous solution of 15-minute workouts (some of which are quite sensible, and replete with body positivity advice). Proper nutrition and specialist healthcare is often essential, but also inaccessible to many. Poor women and women of color cannot deal with the innumerable post-partum challenges in the same way that rich and White women can, and it is crucial to step away from the individualistic approach that characterizes so much of the discussion concerning mothers’ bodies and move toward a collectivistic one, in particular one that addresses the socio-economic injustice perpetrated against gestational mothers in this country.

The pushback against the “excuse mentality” is thus often valid. The pluralistic approach according to which everyone can just do what they want is oblivious to the social inequality within motherhood.

But there is something that the pluralistic approach gets right, and I want to try and understand what that might be. It seems to me that conceiving of the debate in terms of social justice and social construction of normative ideals is compatible with acknowledging that mothers do care about what they look like and what they can do with their bodies. Some mothers are fitness trainers, models, actors, dancers. And even those for whom the body does not play such a substantive role in their self-image or their professional career might benefit from restoring some of the pre-pregnancy and pre-birth capabilities and looks. In other words, while working within a framework that is attentive to systemic injustice, we can and should pay attention to individual pursuits and identities, and strive to support them.

For me, given the role that dancing has in my life, post-pregnancy bodily changes felt dramatic even though they were invisible to others. I suffered from diastasis recti, namely a separation of the abdominal muscles, a common post-partum complication. Mine was light enough that it didn’t hinder any daily activity nor did it show on the outside: I didn’t have the typical “mommy pouch” that so many fitness programs aim to annihilate. But I felt like I had a hole in the very center of my body. When dancing or practicing yoga I could perceive every part of my body, except for a roughly spherical area above my perineum. If I engaged in any sort of proprioception exercise, I could feel a void, a lack of connection between the upper half and the lower half of my body.

It wasn’t a huge void, and I could still do a lot of things. But I felt broken, and no meme about the blessedness of giving birth or the amazing powers of the pregnant body could console me. In fact, these messages really bothered me! Annoyance at loose skin—well, that I could chalk off to vanity, patriarchy and ageism! But this hole? No, that was something I had a right to be mad about.

After my first child, I could afford to see a physical therapist specializing in pelvic floor issues, and I was able to do the exercises she prescribed me every day for several months, probably in part because I was not teaching at the time. After my second child, I was much busier, with two small children, a 3-3 teaching load, research, service and, obviously, dancing! Furthermore, after each pregnancy, bodily changes become more entrenched. But I am one of those lucky mothers: I can afford full-time childcare; my partner takes care of the kids and the household as much and more than I do, when needed, even if that affects his own productivity and self-care; I have the privilege of a tenure-track position at an institution that does not encourage a self-effacing ethics, and where I do not feel like I have to hide that I have a personal life; I am healthy and physically resilient; and perhaps most importantly I believe I have a right to my bodily integrity, even if that means spending less time with my kids (and this is very, very hard to say out loud…).

Thus, I have spent months and years attempting to fill this literal void inside me. It was a very slow process, and I actually did not expect to fully succeed. Two years after giving birth, I thought I had done everything I could, and that the small hole inside me was there to stay. But a few days before my daughter’s third birthday, while I was in the shower, I unreflexively contracted my abdomen, and I suddenly realized I could feel all of my insides! More accurately, I could feel the entirety of my core muscles; I could feel them join from left to right and from top to bottom. The void was gone. I had done it!

Or had I? How much control do we ever have over our bodies? Again, I find myself torn between the need for feeling autonomous, powerful and capable of forging my own destiny, and the moral necessity to recognize the social debts, the dependence on other people’s labor and goodwill. I could have not done this on my own. And thus I think I, we all, as a society, owe it to other mothers to help them celebrate their power of reproduction, while acknowledging that some changes may be debilitating, and that they have a right to be helped overcoming them. Everybody has a right to feel whole, whatever that may mean to them. It may mean recognizing oneself in the mirror again. It may mean having sex without hurting. It may mean not having to use liners or pads every day. It may mean faded scars or stretch marks. It may mean ditching the shapewear, or it may mean buying one.

Pregnancy split me in half. It took me three years to recover, but, today, I feel whole.

[1] Some of what I discuss here applies to mothers of adopted children as well: even though they don’t get pregnant and usually do not breastfeed, taking care of their children might still induce bodily changes, due to stress, reduction of time and resources and so forth. In this post, however, I focus on gestational motherhood. Also, I use “mothers” to refer to people who have typical female reproductive systems, but what I say may apply to transmen who have given birth as well, even though they probably face unique challenges that I am not equipped to discuss.

*I am grateful to Sarah LaChance Adams, Joseph Stramondo, and Adriel M. Trott for helpful feedback on writing this piece. I am also grateful to Jomarie Carlson, Jenny Heron, Christine Hills, Erin Joosse, Melanie Kirk-Stauffer, Shen-yi Liao, among others, for their help in my recovery journey. Photo credits to Duc Nguyen.

Sara Protasi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Puget Sound. She has published articles on beauty, love, and envy (and the intersections thereof). She is currently writing a book in which she defends her original taxonomy of envy, and discusses its normative implications.