Category Archives: strength

Beauty and Strength

This morning when I read G’s past two blog posts it really hit home for me. She talked about self-doubt and what can be our own poor self-image. How many times have you downplayed someone’s compliment of you? Or how many times have you looked at yourself in the mirror before going out somewhere and said “good enough” because you KNOW that you can’t possibly look better because you are fat, bloated, ugly, NOT WORTHY…I can step up and easily tell you that I am guilty of that on a daily basis.

I gave birth 16-days ago. I gained a total of 28-healthy-pounds and of that I have 11-pounds to lose in order to get to my pre-pregnancy weight. Those 11-pounds are already weighing on me (no pun intended). The little voice in my head is beating myself up for not being at pre-preggo weight; it is yelling at me for having a flabby belly.

G’s blog post today challenged us to:

Post a photo of yourself on your blog that makes you feel beautiful, or epic, or Galactically Bada**. Or all of the above is OK too.

I thought long and hard about this. I am so critical of myself that I can find something wrong in most photos: my hair looked bad, you can see a roll of flab, my smile was terrible, my lazy eye was REALLY lazy, I looked fat…

However, when I really thought about it, I came up with two photos that made me feel beautiful, that made me feel strong, that made me feel complete–they are photos taken of me during both of my pregnancies. When I think about how I am upset with myself for not being back to pre-pregnancy status 16-days post partum, I stop and look at my son and daughter. The body that I scold and berate grew two children and nourished them after birth. When I look at these photos and then look into the faces of my children, I ask myself how I can say I am ugly or weak when I think that they are the most beautiful children in the world? I am a part of them and they are a part of me.