My husband’s six-pack and the body I couldn’t recognise

On pregnancy, personal style and finding your way back to your body.

Before I fell pregnant, I was the fittest I had ever been. More importantly, after years of struggling with body image, I was finally beginning to feel proud of my body. I’d reached a place where it no longer felt like a project to fix. It simply felt like mine. Then I had a baby.

I came out the other side with stretch marks, four fingers of abdominal separation, a C-section scar and a body I no longer knew how to inhabit. My husband came out of it with the same six-pack he’d had since he was eighteen. The bastard.

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To be clear, I wasn’t angry at him. He’d done absolutely nothing wrong. If he was guilty of anything, it was the deeply offensive act of looking exactly the same, while my body looked like it had clearly attended the life event we’d both just lived through.

The funny thing is I’d barely noticed his abs before then, even though they’d always been there. 

Two weeks after our daughter was born, we were invited to a wedding. My husband reached for the same suit he’d worn to countless weddings before, ironed his shirt and was ready in 20 minutes. I stood in front of a wardrobe that suddenly belonged to someone else. 

I wish I could tell you what I wore that day because it feels like the sort of detail that should matter in an essay about clothes, but I can’t. I only remember standing there, looking at dresses I’d once loved and realising they no longer made sense to me. Not simply because they wouldn’t zip up (although most of them didn’t), but because they belonged to a version of me who understood her body.

I remember thinking it was wildly unfair that after creating an entire person, the thing defeating me was a zip. Looking back, I don’t think pregnancy changed my body nearly as much as it changed my relationship with it. 

I’d spent years making peace with my reflection. Confidence hadn’t arrived because I’d reached the ‘right’ weight. It arrived much more subtly, through changing rooms where I stopped apologising, mornings where getting dressed became an act of expression rather than correction and the slow, imperceptible realisation that my body and I had finally called a truce.

Fashion has always been one of the ways I recognise myself. Standing in front of that wardrobe wasn’t simply about finding a dress that fit, it was realising I no longer knew how to express myself through a body that felt unfamiliar. 

It followed me to the bedroom, too, not because I felt unloved but because I felt unrecognisable. My husband would tell me I looked beautiful with the confidence of a man who genuinely believed this was useful information, but every compliment landed somewhere just outside me.

He never once suggested I should ‘bounce back’. He never hinted that my body needed fixing or compared me to the woman I’d been before pregnancy. It took me years to realise he wasn’t trying to convince me of anything, he was simply telling me what he saw. I was the one arguing with him.

Eight years have passed since I gave birth, and I’ve realised this isn’t my postpartum body anymore. It’s simply my body, complete with the stretch marks, the scar and a stomach that doesn’t look the way it did before and probably never will. For years I thought acceptance would arrive when I got back to the woman I used to be, until I eventually had to confront the harder truth that she wasn’t coming back.

My husband never seemed particularly bothered that it had gone. My daughter has never even known it existed.

Every so often she’ll ask to see my scar, tracing it gently with her finger before asking, once again, how she came out. She looks at it with complete fascination, as though she’s examining something remarkable, and it occurred to me recently that she’s never once looked at my body and seen loss. She sees the place she came from.

I spend an enormous amount of time telling her how incredible her body is. I tell her it’s strong, capable, and that beauty is the least interesting thing about it because the real magic is what it allows her to do. I tell her these things with absolute conviction. I’ve just never been particularly good at believing them about myself.

Looking back, I don’t think I ever resented my husband’s unchanged physique. I resented that becoming parents had left our bodies telling such different stories. Mine became a record of everything we’d built together, and I mistook those changes for evidence that I’d become less.

Some mornings the mirror is louder than my husband. Some mornings it’s louder than me. But now and then my daughter asks to see my scar again, and for a moment I get to borrow her eyes instead of my own.

The six-pack, however, still feels a little unnecessary.

For more on postpartum style, try this.