Lost During the Journey

This is my body, yet I cannot seem to find myself amongst all the wrinkled folds of flesh and deeply grooved battle scars etched in my skin from pregnancy after pregnancy after pregnancy.

This is not how I began, so it will not be how I end.

I am woman.

It doesn’t affect my love for you. This is about me and my truth.

It does pose challenges for self-love and acceptance, though.

Questions how anyone else can love this and accept that, as is, when I can’t?

I don’t resent you.

I resent myself for not having those good genes of mutant women who bounce right back. Those select few who end up coming out without a scratch.

Life is a beautiful gift, but sometimes at the risk of disfigurement at the center where it all begins.

Why do I have to live with the sacrifice of my outer self?

Only mothers can empathize with how it changes one inside and out.

This is my body, yet I no longer recognize myself because I’ve created yours.

What’s more—as I continue to nourish you, I continue to change outwardly.

So much so that I can’t remember how I used to be.

I barely recollect the body, which was lusted over ultimately resulting in how you came to be.

So when I chose you, it was over me. Unknowingly.

But I would not change your existence. Simply the evidence of it left on me.

Causing me to live with what I wanted no one else to ever see.

I lost freedom of self. Estimably, confidently, romantically, intimately…

Couldn’t comfortably share myself with anyone else without hiding what lay underneath.

Preventing me from being my truest self. Not living up to my highest potential. Being all who I could be.

Hiding behind sizing up. Some things you can’t work off in the gym.

The Curse of Eve was not simply labor and delivery, but marked flesh, loose skin, sagging breasts and loss of ones dignity.

It is a fact of Life.

All I ever wanted was to make it right.

Adopting a realistic desire of restoration.

Wanting to no longer be distracted by my own malformations.

Welts on my lower back, dips in my hips, and flames rising to the tops of my rib cage will remain.

But erasing some of this part of me that has no rightful place is not vain.

It is what allows my happiness to be regained.

I am realistic. I knew there were to be sacrifices.

But I do not agree that the life of you had to mean the death of me.

I do not agree with my body having to be altered permanently and my beauty lost unnecessarily.

This is my body, and I am forever changed. I shook the hand of the man who had a hand in having unearthed its hidden beauty awaiting its moment to be reclaimed.

Finally, revealing who I’ve always been. Freeing me, once again.

“I’d like to proudly introduce myself, I am woman.”

This does not detract from being mommy. It rectifies what was lost during the journey.