The postpartum body: an important article recommendation
“I do not want to write my children out of my body’s history.“
If you’ve been with my blog/newsletter thingy for a bit, you know that summer is a slow time for + the sanitarium +. I know this will come as a shock to you, but it turns out that creative endevours requiring any amount of uninterrupted concentration are completely impossible when one’s kids are home from school for the summer.
So, to fill in the long gaps between when I can write for you guys, the best thing to do is to send you helpful articles from other writers.
The article I’m sending you today is from a fellow Substack writer named Rachael Killackey, who is Catholic and runs some sort of non-profit that I believe has to do with women and pregnancy.
I’m not Catholic myself but I sometimes find myself really appreciating the Catholic perspective. Heck, half the people I quoted in my book are Catholic, inlcuding an entire chapter I wrote about Joan of Arc and her relationship with her mother, Isabelle Romée.
Anyway, I found this article not only really well put and really beautiful, but also refreshingly pertinent to the modern mother’s experience when it comes to our postpartum bodies. None of us are exempt from the temptation to try to enforce on ourselves the shallow, harsh, unrealistic standards of what our culture deems as beautiful.
As a side note, my favorite line in Rachael’s article, “I do not want to write my children out of my body’s history,” makes me think of something my architect husband told me one time when we were touring his firm’s office in Washington. The owners of the firm had converted a former two-story mechanics shop that was in terrible disrepair into a gorgeous suite of modern offices.
I remember walking down the stairs and being struck by the beauty of a huge wall composed entirely of 2x4s that were turned so their slim side was showing, rather than their broad side.
“That’s the firewall from when they built the building in the 30s,” my husband said. “They turned the 2x4s that way so that it would take longer to burn through them in the event of a fire. A rather elegant solution to the need for a firewall, if you ask me. But with all that wood, too expensive to recreate these days.”
“And the firm owners chose to leave them exposed rather than putting sheetrock over them?”
“Yes,” he said, revelling in this architecturally nerdy moment that he was sharing with me, “that’s called Honesty of Materials. It’s letting the materials be just as they are in the building, either because their raw form is pleasing to the eye (like stone or brick or wood), or because it reveals an aspect of the building’s history that is too unique or too beautiful to cover up.”
Or, to quote the Google AI response when “honesty of materials” is searched,
Honesty of materials," also known as "truth to materials," is a design principle that emphasizes using materials in their natural state or revealing their true nature, rather than disguising or mimicking other materials…In essence, honesty of materials is about creating designs that are genuine, authentic, and respectful of the materials used, rather than resorting to artifice or deception. (emphasis mine)
Artifice and deception. I can’t think of a better term for the beauty industry and/or standards of today.
I want to see my post baby body the same way I saw that exposed firewall: as way more true and interesting than the canned standards of my culture. I want to see it as evidence of an important story, deserving respect due to what it’s been through and how it has been constructed, not derision.
We can either fold ourselves up into something that can fit in our culture’s narrow box of what we should or shouldn’t be, or we can choose the broad freedom of honesty and truth that says the fresh creation of body, soul, and spirit within a womb is too important and too beautiful to cover up, feel bad about, or erase. Read Rachael’s article and you’ll see her compelling arguments for the latter.
