Dressed to Depress

Image from footedpajamasforwomen.org. Yes, such a magical site actually exists.

When my baby was eight days old, I got dressed.

Impressive, right? An eight-day stretch of pajama-ness (needless to say, it was not pretty). But on Saturday, I finally mustered up the motivation to take my daily shower a few steps further. I put on some makeup. I pulled my hair into a simple updo.

And then I stood in my closet naked and bawled.

No, I didn't expect to fit back into my pre-pregnancy jeans or any such sort of lofty goal. I mean when you gain fifty pounds, it tends to, y'know, hang around for a while. But I was at least hoping that my newest maternity jeans would fit me properly. The cute ones that I wore for only about a week before my gargantuan stomach pushed the poor elastic to its limit and I had to retire them to the closet. I was hoping that now, since said stomach had deflated a bit, they would be usable.

But no. Because my ass and thighs had other ideas.

The one thing I heard most during my pregnancy, repeated over and over and over (well, besides oh my GAWD! and You poor thing! and Is there more than one in there? and You've got to be overdue!) was, "You're all belly!" I think people said that either a.) just to be nice, or b.) because my belly was in fact so huge that they couldn't look past it long enough to notice the ginormous hips and thighs holding it up.

So when I tried to slip on my maternity jeans, envisioning them sliding right up like they used to, it came as quite a shock when I couldn't tug them past my burgeoning buttocks.

It was like adding salt to a wound. I mean, I'm already teetering on the brink of depression over my post-baby belly. Not that it was nice before, by ANY stretch of the imagination (except for my 25 years on earth prior to having kids - check out a before-and-after comparison here). No, before I had Corbin, my belly was already saggy and stretchmarked. But? The carriage and delivery of my fourth child took a bad thing and made it worse. I've got that lovely postpartum bread-dough glut of jiggly flab, the kind you have to lift up in order to see your C-section incision. Plus I still look at least four months pregnant.

"Ugh" and "blah" are not strong enough words.

I know: it'll go away, everything will shrink back to its normal size, and I can hide what's left under my shirt and tuck it into my pants and look actually pretty decent at some point in the future. But until then, I hate every flabby, leaky, cranky postpartum moment. It's gonna be a long, depressing road back, y'all.

I'm "fighting off frumpy" once again. Would now be a good time to invest in some Pajama Jeans?