It's probably predictable that this article would push my buttons. It's about women fixing their hair and makeup immediately after their babies are born so they'll look nice when the pictures are posted on Facebook.
In my view, the expectation that a woman will look just like she always does in the moments after she gives birth trivializes the event. If I had just finished a triathlon, would you be surprised to find I had untidy hair? (The people who know me in real life say, No, Jamie, the surprise is when your hair is not untidy.) I have never done anything as physically demanding as giving birth to my children. Their birthday pictures remind me that I poured my heart into something beautiful -- they could all be captioned "Mettle, tested." I love those pictures for their nakedness, even though I am clothed in all of them. Concealer is beside the point.
In this picture I am looking a little peaky even though I am on top of the world: that's because I hemorrhaged after my second son's birth. Sometimes birth can be brutal and dangerous. Honestly, I think the idea that a woman should be Facebook-ready twenty minutes afterward is one of the crazy expectations that contribute to the incidence of PPD in this country. Pregnancy weight gain = bad! Get back in those skinny jeans! Hurry up and go back to work! What's the matter with you that you can't get out of the house? "The matter" is that you just had a baby -- it's supposed to be a life-altering event.
Here's the thing I find most curious: what's going on with the baby while mom is blending her eyeshadow? Does it make more sense as part of the hospital birth scene, where it's not unusual for babies to spend some time being examined or bathed away from their mothers? I love that first postpartum hour or two, basking in the post-birth glow with the hard work behind us. I have held my babies greedily all through those hours, nuzzling their damp little heads and memorizing their faces. (I have been wrestling with this paragraph for an absurdly long time now because I think it might sound judgmental and that's not my intent. The tone is more puzzled than judgy, I promise.) I have never been happier than I was in this picture. And yeah, my face is red. So what? You propel a 9#12 baby with a 38+cm head through your pelvis, and then tell me if you're thinking about skin tone.
One of my college Greek classes was taught by an elderly professor with a quavery voice and silvery hair. We were reading the first chapter of the gospel of John and he taught us something I'll never forget about the word translated as "children" in verse 12. It's a word without an exact analogue in English -- a participle, teknon, that means "one having been born." It connotes, he said, the tender love a mother feels for the child she has borne, a love refined in the crucible of sweat and blood and pain. Irrevocable love. Transforming love.
By any objective standard I am not looking my best in this picture, taken in the first minute after my daughter was born. (That's meconium smeared on my pajamas. All the fashionable moms are wearing meconium this season.) But I see this picture and I remember that sometimes determination is costly. I remember that sometimes you have to lean into suffering to find a way through it. I remember that fear gets me nowhere. And I remember longing fulfilled, the joy beyond words of seeing that little face at last. It's a glimpse of a place between worlds: she is no longer contained within my body, not yet untethered from it.
I have spent hours writing about the lessons birth has taught me, as well as some time writing about beauty. I know that my views on epidurals and eyeliner (in a word: overused) are not the norm, and the point of this post is not to say "Women of America, UR DOIN IT RONG." I think it's worthwhile, though, to push back against the idea that we just want to erase the pain of birth along with any traces it might leave. I believe real beauty has nothing to do with mascara. I believe we're never more beautiful than when we say, "This is my body, given up for you."
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