self-care

Real self-care: Forget pedicures and bubble baths.

A bipolar, body-positive bread enthusiast with a fucked-up pretty much healed ankle and a history of disordered eating chroni

I look pregnant. This body has made six humans. This belly has been inflated and collapsed and inflated and collapsed, and so on. What should it look like?

I don’t want to spend another summer waiting for winter. It took years to realize this, and even more years to act on it. This is the work of healing that no one mentions: you have to find the wounds you didn’t know you had.

Eventually, I accepted the need to just let things go (like keeping up with cleaning), and embrace all the chaos that new motherhood brings. So, here are some tips from people who know best, plus one that I think I learned the hard way.

Anxiety.

Few things make a body feel better than less things holding it back, be it physical, emotional, or gravitational.

It did not solve all of my problems. It did not make the reality of this deep hurt go away. But it did make me feel more like myself, which I'd begun to fear I would never feel again.