The Body I Stopped Trying to Get Back

After having three children, my body changed in ways I hadn’t expected.

There were stretch marks. Loose skin. Breasts that looked very different after nursing three babies. And across my lower abdomen was the scar left behind by three cesarean sections.

I’ve always thought that scar looked a little like a smile.

And in a way, it is.

It’s a reminder of the three babies my body carried into this world.

But motherhood left other marks, too.

After my second child, I experienced an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured and caused internal bleeding. I lost a fallopian tube, and the recovery was difficult—physically and emotionally. I was grieving the loss of a pregnancy while also coming to terms with how close I had come to losing my own life.

When I became pregnant again, I knew what a gift it was.

At 29, I had my third and final child.

My body had carried me through pregnancy, childbirth, loss, fear, healing and motherhood.

And yet, when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t always see everything my body had done.

Sometimes I simply saw everything that had changed.

Trying to Get My Younger Body Back

At 35, I wanted some of my old body back.

My breasts had changed dramatically after pregnancy and nursing, and no amount of exercise was going to tighten stretched skin. So I decided to have a breast lift and augmentation.

At the time, I thought I was restoring something.

Maybe I was trying to reclaim the body I remembered. Maybe I thought looking more youthful would make me feel more like myself again.

For a while, I lived with that decision.

Seventeen years, actually.

But over time, the implants became less like something I had chosen and more like something I was carrying around.

Especially in Taekwondo.

They got in the way of movement and activity, and as the years passed, I found myself questioning why I was still carrying something that no longer felt like me.

Something Else Was Changing

Then I stopped coloring my hair.

At first, choosing to let my natural silver grow in seemed like a decision about hair.

But it wasn’t.

As I watched my natural color emerge, something else began happening. I was beginning to understand that accepting my aging body meant allowing it to be what it was instead of constantly asking it to resemble an earlier version of me.

And eventually I looked at my breast implants differently, too.

I knew I wanted them gone.

At 52, seventeen years after having them put in, I had them removed.

And the feeling afterward surprised me.

I felt free.

And yes—I felt a whole lot lighter. Literally. 😄

But the real lightness wasn’t physical.

It was the feeling of no longer carrying something simply because I once believed I needed it to look younger.

The Body I Have Now

My body isn’t the body I had at 25.

It isn’t supposed to be.

This body has carried three children.

It has survived loss.

It has healed from surgeries.

It has trained in Taekwondo.

It has worked, moved, aged, changed and carried me through more than five decades of life.

There are stretch marks.

There is loose skin.

There is that little smile across my lower belly.

And there are parts of me that gravity has definitely become acquainted with. 😄

I’m not saying I’ve reached some magical place where I love every single thing I see in the mirror every day.

I haven’t.

What has changed is that I no longer believe every sign of aging needs to be corrected.

There is a difference between taking care of ourselves and spending our lives trying to erase the evidence that we have lived.

I’m beginning to understand that more and more.

Choosing silver was never just about my hair.

It was about allowing myself to become natural again.

It was about looking at the woman I am now instead of constantly trying to reconstruct the woman I used to be.

I spent years trying to get my younger body back.

Eventually, I realized I didn’t need it back.

I needed to feel at home in the body I have now.