postpartum experience Quotes

I loved being pregnant. I felt unapologetically curvy, sexy, and intensely feminine. After giving birth I joined the ranks of millions of new mothers when I moaned, 'Why do I still look pregnant?'

You only hear the horror stories - that after a baby, you never get your body back - but it's not true; it depends on your life beforehand.

"I can't believe you recently had a baby. How do you do it?" The baby starts to come down...and once that happens you can't-it comes out. Whether you let it or not, the baby comes out. So that's how I did it.

I moved out to L.A. and had my son and was walking around Gelson's, and I was like, 'Am I just one giant, lactating boob? Is that what I've become?'

There's an identity crisis that happens when you give birth. I don't care how confident, how secure you are, how much help you have, how many kids you have. For me, it was major.

The very damaging, frightening part of postpartum is the lack of perspective and the lack of priority and understanding what is really important.

I wasn't like those girls who give birth and are back on the runway. It took me probably six months to gain 45 pounds and I would say it took me double that time to lose it.

Getting a pedicure seems to be a standard pre-birth ritual, presumably because it is relaxing and makes you feel pretty even though your little piggies are going to be covered in those awesome no-skid hospital socks which I kept on for three days.

Whenever and however you give birth, your experience will impact your emotions, your mind, your body, and your spirit for the rest of your life.

I went back to work about six weeks after I gave birth, which was crazy early, and experienced some pretty bad postpartum depression but didn't know it at the time.

When Hailey was born my first thought was that I needed a drink and that hospitals should have bars in them.

For me, I was the most vulnerable and needed the most in my postpartum experience and got the least. It was just kind of a drop-off. That would be my focus - on the woman, afterwards.

My main focus is on becoming a new mom and giving the best of myself to my husband and growing baby.

Right after you have a baby, the focus is on the baby. You don't feel sexual; you don't feel attractive; and you have a bigger job.

When I had a baby, I was consumed with my body.

One thing that I would like to do that I've seen them not do that well is take women all through the process of the postpartum period in a more meaningful way. That would be my agenda.

Bringing a baby into the world is not like grilling enchiladas. It's a difficult thing.

Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.

I feel like there's so much focus on the woman when you're pregnant, and it's amazing and beautiful and everybody's taking care of you, and then you have the baby and nobody's interested. And yet you are the most vulnerable you've been - I mean, I'm speaking on my own experience. Other women may have very different experiences.

It's always when you think that you've lost a little of the baby weight that someone steps in grabs a handful of a now sans baby soft belly and asks the inevitable 'When are you due?'

I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.