body and baby

these photos were taken in august of last year, at a dance workshop in ashland, oregon. the third pic is of my belly in june, 2007. how much i'd grown in a year!

last night i tried to take a dance class. i have been taking dance classes since i was three. the dance studio is a place where i feel safe, feel at home, feel welcome and absolutely confident and comfortable. last night was an exception. i was anxious. i had left my baby with her dad and grandparents during her prime "witching hour", the hardest time of the day for her. i was taking an african inspired hip-hop class, given by a dancing friend and peer. we've performed together for years and actually started our own little performance group a few months before i got pregnant. good timing. the group quickly folded when i got too big to move comfortably, could no longer find my ribs, and jumping posed a huge challenge for my round ligaments. but the point is, i was at the top of my dancing game this time last year. i was in super fine shape, was confident and diva like, ready to strut my afro-latino, modern-fusion inspired moves all over montana.

then pregnancy comes and rocks your body. and even if you deliver vaginally like a rock star (as i did), and you are hiking and doing yoga within a few months of her delivery (as i did), nothing really prepares you to stand in front of a full length mirror and watch your new body navigate through old, cobwebby waters. at first it felt pretty easy. the moves were familiar. i was facing forward. i was wearing black. but then i would turn to the side, and all i would see is that fleshy new silhouette, the leftover belly that at ten weeks, still lingers. i felt the changes when it was time to do push ups and sit ups. i could do one for every three the girls were doing, my body just slower than before. and then my whole dancing style was different. i feel so grounded now with this child, so very rooted in the earth. i was all bent legs and heavy hips, super sultry and low like my fifty plus year old brazilian dancing teacher in los angeles. sexy and mama like. no longer light and weightless.

and then the body image distracted me from the class. i started to not really care what the moves looked like. instead i started fixating. upon reflection, i think this is really ridiculous. really sad. my body has done miraculous things in the last year. while i did gain a ton of weight in pregnancy, it wasn't from binging on ice-cream and chocolate. it was steak. and almonds. and, okay, lots of peanut butter (our bradley method birth class teacher insisted that we eat 80 to 100 grams of protein a day...you try it...it requires quite a bit of peanut butter!). and then my body cooperated and danced eliana out, shooting her onto that red bed just like we were genetically engineered to do. so why am i being so hard on myself? so what if my cords still don't button. none of my mama friend's can fit into their jeans yet, but we are all sexy and strong women. i've been lucky enough to have gone through my 33 years without an eating disorder. this, unfortunately, can't be said for most american women today. so why all the mean looks in the mirror. why the flailing self-esteem? perhaps it's because i feel more beautiful than ever before, and i want my waistline to reflect that beauty, not refute it. maybe because, at the end of the day, i am an american girl, who grew up in a dance studio, who has just always been fairly lucky with regards to metabolism. or maybe i'm just not being patient with myself. all it takes is a look at my little baby, though, and i feel absolutely gorgeous and needed and loved and of incredible value. so i high tailed out of that dance studio, and raced back up the hill to retrive my girl.