Pregnancy: the Aftermath

I've been mulling over this post for a while, but wasn't quite ready to write it until now. Maria is 18 months old and I think I've (mostly!) gotten back to my old self, but it's taken a long while.

All sorts of strange things happen to one's body while it is growing a baby. The weight gain is a given, but what about gaining a shoe size? Crazy, but true! My shoes got pretty tight toward the end of pregnancy, but I figured I was just retaining water. Yet as the summer wore on, I was wearing holes in my poor feet by wearing my old shoes. In the end I gave away all my closed-toed shoes in one fell swoop so I'd stop thinking that maybe today they'd fit. I sometimes still miss them! I guess carrying all that extra weight around for 9 months did something permanent to my feet. I just hope I don't gain a shoe size with every pregnancy or I'll be having to special order shoes!

I think the worst after-effect of pregnancy was losing my hair. Yes, about 4 months after Maria was born my hair started coming out by the handful. I think in the end I lost 1/3 to 1/2 of my hair. People normally shed a certain number of hairs every day, but apparently when a woman is expecting she just doesn't shed any hair. Then after the baby is born she starts losing hair at a rapid clip to make up for not losing any for 9 months. The hair loss rate returns to normal and usually no one is any the wiser (as long as she cleans up the drain after a shower!). Alas, for some women (like me!) the hair loss is pretty severe. I chopped my hair short and wore scarves for months. It was a very depressing time. I don't know how men feel about hair loss, but at least it seems somewhat normal for it to happen to some men depending on their genes. But for a woman to lose her hair, that' s just not expected, not perceived as beautiful, and very, very hard to accept. Thankfully it has grown back.

And then there's the weight gain. Friends told me it takes about x months to lose the baby weight where x = 6 or 9 or some other number around there. When Maria was about 8 months old I realized I had a long way to go and that I hadn't been losing any weight for the last 6 months. It didn't matter that the holidays were coming up, it was time to face reality and do something about it. I joined Weight Watchers. It took about 10 more months of going to meetings, writing down what I ate, learning all about realistic potion sizes, well-balanced meals, strategies for dealing with cravings and how to get back on the wagon after failures. A few weeks ago it all paid off. I reached my goal weight (several pounds BELOW what I weighed before I had Maria) and became a Lifetime Member of Weight Watchers! Yeah! It was a very happy moment and though I suppose I could have lost the weight a lot faster, I'm really glad I stuck with it, learned some valuable lessons and reached my goal in the end.

My assessment in the end is that this was all worth it to have a sweetie like Maria in my life. She's been getting more into "pretend play" as the books call it. She found a (clean!) kleenex on the floor today and went over to the cat to wipe his nose! She put her stuffed gorilla in her high chair and proceeded to try to feed him goldfish. Her aim was a bit off because some of them were going more up his nose and in his eyes. Poor gorilla!