Day 27: Mummy Tummy

Over the course of this challenge, I promised myself two things: 1) I would leave any and all body issue blogs to my gloriously talented guest blogger Tescha Orio and 2) I would limit myself to only one Royal family related blog. Typically, I excel in keeping promises, even the silly little ones that no one knows that I've made. But then I saw the following picture accompanied by the following comment (which I'm sorry to report, is an real, unedited comment) and I knew I'd have to go back on my word:

"Is Kate Middleton still preggo or what?" asked an anonymous internet commenter, who is obviously both a sensitive human being and not at all someone with too much time on their hands. "She looks bloated and disgusting. William should have shown off the baby by himself or they could have waited until she didn't look like such a cow."

Wow. Just...wow. There are so many things wrong with this comment that I don't know where to start

I remember the days, weeks, and months following the birth of my first child. There were the things that I was expecting (sleepless nights, a vague, but constant feeling of terror, and overwhelming amount of love) but there were things that I wasn't expecting, most of which were body-related. I had assumed (wrongly, blindly, stupidly, even) that the moment I gave birth my body would go back to the way it was before. I had seen enough "(Insert random celebrity here)'s Rockin' Post-Baby Bikini Bod" headlines to assume that the human body just sort of bounced back. Maybe I was just completely ignorant or I was believing what society wanted me to believe, but it was a shock to me to find that this is absolutely not the case.

I remember three months after Layla was born (while my stomach still looked like a deflated tire and all of my pants remained elastic-waisted) wondering what I was doing wrong. I had an extremely healthy pregnancy and an extremely healthy baby as a result, but I didn't deny myself  my cravings (I remember one time I had a craving for brownies. I baked a pan and wound up eating the entire thing. Rather than admitting it to my husband that I had eaten the whole pan, I baked another tray and shared them with him when he got home, as if the first ones had never existed. I'm a winner). Layla was one of those awesome babies who loved to be outside in her stroller, so we walked constantly, but eating for two is a difficult habit to break. I lost the weight eventually (please note my use of the word eventually. As in, not immediately, certainly not by US Weekly standards). By my next pregnancy, I knew what a post-baby body really looked like and I managed my expectations accordingly. Eventually (again, note the word) I learned to accept the fact that my body's not perfect. It wasn't perfect before I was pregnant and it certainly isn't now, despite being years out from my most recent pregnancy. But it doesn't bother me because perfect is a lie. I'm healthy and I'm active, and the way my body looks to other people isn't what defines me as a person. I have long accepted the fact that the human body doesn't bounce back (at least not with out a MASSIVE amount of effort) and that basically, celebrities aren't human. Having a six pack two months after you deliver is not natural and it certainly shouldn't be the standard that we all hold ourselves to. We just grew a human being. Cut us a little slack.

But enough about me. Back to Kate.

For what it's worth, I personally love (love, love, love, LOVE) the fact that she looked the way she did when she presented her new son. She looked great actually, certainly much better than I did the day after I gave birth (vaguely like I had been run over by a train). She didn't try to hide her body or disappear from the media until she was "bikini-ready" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean). She didn't succumb to our standards of beauty, and instead of being praised for being so normal and human, she was called fat and disgusting, and magazines immediately began to speculate about her diet plans, all vying for the first interview with her personal trainer. Fox News (gag) even dared to name her "condition": Mummy Tummy.

Really? Mummy Tummy? Bitch, please.

Things like this make me feel like my head is going to explode. I'm just so sick and tired of both men and women being so hard on women, particularly women's bodies. I long for the day when people realize that we weren't all created on an assembly line, we all look and think differently, and that's okay. I wish we lived in a world where our outer appearance wasn't the most important thing about a person, but until then I will take living in a world where people understand the calling someone fat the day after they give birth is nothing short of preposterous. I would say that I wished we didn't live in a world where people wouldn't make rude comments about people they don't know but talk about like they do know, but I'm smart enough to know when I'm asking for too much.

Sometimes it's just hard for a girl to catch a break, even when you're the Duchess of Bloody Cambridge.