It’s a separation of your abdominal wall, and it causes that “mommy gut” or “pooch” that is so unflattering. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I dug up a memory of a mom friend telling me about her D.R., and I did a self-exam and, yep, that’s what I have. I kept looking at my body though and feeling like something wasn’t right. Let’s be clear though: I self-diagnosed, because the OB/GYN (who delivered both my babies and is great) didn’t tell me that I had it. That said, I think a lot of people don’t talk about it, either because they honestly don’t know they have it or they are embarrassed by the changes in their bodies. The more time you spend with pregnant women and mothers though, the more often it comes up. I had heard of it before I had my first baby, but only once I was pregnant. But I try to remind myself that I have three beautiful boys out of it. Prior to having children I had a regular stomach that was flat - I mean, I didn’t have a six pack or anything, but it was just a flat belly, and now it juts out maybe six inches or so. So my stomach still juts out a little bit, almost like I’m in my first trimester. After this baby, I don’t find myself being so vigilant that it’s repairing. Keep your stomach taut and pulled in, in everything you do.” I do think it helped, but you have to be pretty religious about it.
She would say, “Don’t ever let your stomach hang loose, ever. After my first baby, I went to a place in the city and saw a woman who specializes in helping women with this. There are exercises that you can do to repair it a lot of them involve regularly pulling your belly button up toward your spine. I can feel it when I lie down I can put my fist in my belly and measure it. It makes sense to me, that when your abdomen is growing in that way, that the muscles just separate: Everything is growing, you’re making room for the baby. So it’s called diastasis recti, and here’s what I’ve learned about it: The muscles of your abdomen that are vertical - they’re called transverse muscles - those get separated during pregnancy. I’m hopeful that they’ll go back to normal when I stop breastfeeding, but they might be totally different for the rest of my life. Then again, because it’s leaking, I have to wear a nursing pad, so that kind of evens out how big they look. I have this annoying problem where even though my baby won’t eat from the left breast, it still produces, and it leaks all the time.
#Everyone has a story to tell and a scar to bare how to#
It’s amazing that my body has figured out how to have one boob be enough to sustain him, but it also means that my right boob is two cup sizes bigger than my left boob. So for my son at a certain point, he was like, “Why am I gonna try to get this milk out if I’m only going to get a snack?” But from my left, I only ever get one ounce - that’s the max I ever get. Like, when I pump, I can get four ounces out of my right breast in a session, which is as much as a baby needs in a feeding. Every time I tried to have him nurse on the left side, he’d just push away and cry.Īnother thing I didn’t know until I was a breastfeeding mom: Your breasts can have very different milk capacities. My son is 7 months old and he has nursed exclusively from my right breast for 5 months. One thing that nobody told me about was that very often, babies will reject one breast when you’re breastfeeding. Here’s what they told us.ġ Woman Whose Boobs Are Different Sizes Now We asked women to tell us the wildest thing that happened to their bodies during pregnancy or after giving birth. But beyond that, there simply isn’t a lot of rigorous research tracking the changes that happen to the bodies of new moms and moms-to-be.īut you know who does know what happens to postpartum bodies? The owners of those bodies.
We do know from research that diastasis recti - a separation of the abdominal muscles - may affect up to 60 percent of postpartum women six weeks after giving birth, and as Angela Garbes reports in her new book, Like A Mother, pelvic pain and pelvic floor problems are also common. What exactly does having a baby do to your body? Who knows! Postpartum care in particular tends to be focused on the new baby rather than the new mother, which means (among other things), that many of the changes that happen to a woman’s body during and after pregnancy may go unreported. It’s for anybody who wants to be a new mom, is a new mom, was a new mom, or wants really good reasons to never be a new mom.
NEW MOM explores the brilliant, terrible, wonderful, confusing realities of first-time motherhood.