I'm standing there looking at myself and for the first time, I actually see it.
I'm six weeks pregnant with Phoenix (our name for baby number two) barely showing, but my body is already changing and taking shape. I've stood here before, in this same mirror, and catalogued the same things. Saggy boobs, one bigger than the other, one saggier than the other. The little pooch. The softness where there used to be nothing.
But this time it was different.
Instead of clocking all the imperfections, I felt something else, a recognition of something primal and ancient, like one of those ancient artefacts carved in reverence of the female body. A body I first met when I was pregnant with Dragon (our nickname for our son), and I’m now meeting again with different eyes, for the first time.
Standing there, I felt the absolute raw power of what we carry as women. Not as an idea, but a feeling in my body and in my bones. This body had already created, held and nourished a life. And here it was, holding and creating another. Soft and worn in the way only a mother's body is, but not the softness of depletion, where you had given everything and had nothing left. This was something else. A body that had slowly, quietly and learned to stop trying so hard to hold itself together. I was healthy, genuinely, finally healthy, in a fullness I hadn't felt before.
Because I had been told I was healthy. The tests said so. Thyroid levels fine, everything within range, nothing to worry about. But I didn't feel it. Not in my body, in my mind, not when I looked in the mirror. There is a kind of wellness that doesn't show up in a blood panel. I know that now. I knew it then because I could feel its absence.
It took a year and a half to find my way back. Working with practitioners who actually looked at the whole picture. Rebuilding slowly my body, my nervous system, my ability to nourish myself the way I had been nourishing everyone else. That first year postpartum I was so depleted, so underweight, and to most people I looked great. But I could feel what it had cost.
And then standing here, six weeks along, I thought: this is what healthy looks like. This is what it feels like.
My mother used to say it. My father too. You are my literal flesh and blood. I heard it my whole life as language, as love, as something parents say. But standing in that mirror, growing a child from my own body for the second time, I finally felt what they meant even more deeply than I had before. Our children are made of our flesh and blood and bones. Literally. And we were made from our mothers, and they from theirs, on and on until before our modern memory can even fathom.
I had saggy uneven breasts and a belly beginning to round. I was soft in places I never used to be. And I was the most beautiful I have ever felt. Not despite any of it, but because of all of it.
I had made her once, this body, shaped with my own hands when I was pregnant with Dragon. It was the body I could feel taking shape, all the curves and softness I had never had myself, but always loved. I think I was longing for something I didn't yet know I would one day feel.