A friend of mine recently confided in me that being newly pregnant was freaking her out a little bit. She assumed she had some body image issues that were surfacing, not because she had gained any weight yet, but because she was taken aback by how significant early changes to her bodily functions were as a result of pregnancy.
I told her she didn’t have body image issues. She, like so many of us, had never been asked to really meditate on and make space in her mind and heart (AKA soul) about all the changes that her body could or would go through in her lifetime. As a result, the very-normal-changes she was now experiencing felt scary to her.
I went through the same mini-freak out during my pregnancy when it seemed that my appetite and my blood volume doubled overnight. Later, when my belly started growing and my breasts got huge, it weirded me out! “It’s like there’s an alien inside me,” I said to my husband, just as a friend had said to me years prior during her first pregnancy. “This is so weird. Why did God choose to make new humans in this way?” My husband just smiled and told me I was beautiful—good answer—but, sadly, I didn’t believe him because I, too, did not have space in my mind for the new body I was about to have.
It took my entire pregnancy plus six or so postpartum months to accept what had “happened to me”. I realized that no one had ever discussed the changes I was about to experience because of pregnancy with me, so it was hard to wrap my brain around it. I mean, I knew the basics of what to expect (after all, I have a degree in Biology) but I wasn’t ready, deep in my heart, for it to happen to me.
That’s why I decided I need to do some things differently for my kids so that I can alleviate the shock, worry, and shame that so often comes with all the bodily changes a woman may or will experience through her lifetime. I plan to teach my sons and daughters about the nine, perfectly normal stages of an average woman’s body.
That’s why I decided I need to do some things differently for my kids so that I can alleviate the shock, worry, and shame that so often comes with all the bodily changes a woman may or will experience through her lifetime.
-Tenay Benes
tenaybenes.com
Note: Due to life circumstances including abuse, neglect, injury, heredity, or choice, some women do not go through every stage I describe or the way I describe them. If this is you, please know that you are still beautiful, valuable, and lovable, no matter what.
Stage 1: Unborn Baby (Conception to Pre-Birth)
This is how every female baby develops in her mother’s womb. She is female from the moment of conception because her mom’s egg (half a cell) and her dad’s sperm (half a cell) combine to form a full cell with XX sex chromosomes. As a result, her unborn baby body has more estrogen pumping through it than testosterone and her genitals begin to form inside her body (as compared to unborn baby boys who have XY sex chromosomes and pump more testosterone than estrogen, thereby growing genitals that form outside their bodies). She develops all the eggs she will ever have in her lifetime—all the possible children she will ever birth—before she is even born. Otherwise, she is visually indistinguishable from an unborn baby boy.
Stage 2: Infant/Toddler/Child & Not Menstruating (Birth to Pre-Puberty)
This is how every female human being enters this world as a newborn, later growing to an infant, toddler, child, and tween. A little girl’s body looks much like a little boy’s in all of these phases except for the presence of different genitals. The girl’s hips and breasts are straight/flat, not much different than a boy’s, and their hormone levels are similar, too.
Stage 2: Young Adult & Menstruating (Puberty to Pre-Pregnancy)
This is the stage every little girl waits for in her pre-teens to early teenage years (unless, due to environmental toxins, she enters puberty way too early, or due to emotional trauma, she fears growing up). Most girls dream of growing breasts and getting curves from widening hips, so that they can become a beautiful woman. Girls know that the mark of this transformation is to begin her period (AKA menstruate to release an egg into her womb, every month) which means they can now get pregnant. Bleeding every month sucks—and sometimes comes with debilitating cramps or hormonal swings—but most girls look forward to this stage for several years because it is akin to a caterpillar transforming into a beautiful butterfly. Years of asking older girls what puberty is like and dreaming with their peers about when they will get their periods creates neural connections that make the transition much easier to go through when it comes. The talking, questioning, and dreaming create space in their minds for this change to happen without freaking out.
Stage 3: Pregnancy (Fertilization to Pre-Labor) [Optional]
This is the stage where a creature that is not you starts using the organs in your body to grow until it can no longer stay inside you and must be ejected. Sounds weird, right? Yup! What makes it more weird is that the talk about all the changes to a woman’s body in pregnancy significantly reduce in many circles. It’s almost like pregnant body talk is relegated to the private sphere, much like talking about sex or going to the bathroom. This strips most women of much needed mental and emotional support during possibly the weirdest stage of a woman’s life. Even if she does find some friends who have been through what she’s going through, it’s already too late to make space for these changes in her mind! Remember how preparing for stage 2 took one to two years of talking, questioning, and dreaming? Stage 3 needs the same love but doesn’t usually get it.
In this stage, a woman’s body stretches like a balloon. Her hunger, thirst, urine, blood volume, and bowel movements increase. Her sleep and immune responses decrease. She begins cleaning everything and acquiring baby supplies with laser-like focus. Her interest in sex, sense of balance, and priorities change. Her belly and breasts get huge. Her skin, hair, and nails change. Her body gets way more flexible, her organs get cramped (holding less urine and food before they need attention), and she experiences uterine contractions from time to time as her body practices for birth. Her stamina reduces and she begins waddling. By the end, she is often miserable at how big she is and just wants this baby out! That’s when she is ready for stage 4.
Stage 4: Giving Birth (Labor to Afterbirth) [Optional]
I considered whether to make birth a stage or a transition between two stages. I decided to make it it’s own stage because I think it’s important to speak about the predictable changes to your body during this life-altering experience. (Yes, it’s life-altering no matter how smooth it goes or how medicated you are.)
Let’s Talk Vaginal Birth
When your body decides to give birth, waves of muscle contractions in your uterus start rolling from your lower back to your vagina. It feels like menstrual cramps and you remember what a blessing it has been to not have your period for the last nine months. It gets stronger and stronger, possibly over a few days, until your contractions are a few minutes apart.
Your uterus pushes your baby down your cervix and out your now-very-expanded pelvis, through your vaginal canal. You feel the urge to squat on the floor and push like you are going number two. A human being the size of a watermelon comes out a hole that once was the size of a watermelon seed. In some cases, you do go number two at the same time. You may also vomit because, HOLY MOLY, a human being is coming out of your body! Ideally, your skin and muscles are stretchy enough to handle the expansion without tearing, but many women experience some tearing. The idea of your vagina tearing sounds scary but most women recover with just a few stitches.
After your body expels a human being from your vagina, you get a little break until you begin to expel the after-birth: the placenta that’s been feeding your baby through the umbilical tube. Ideally, the placenta separates fully from your body and you don’t have major bleeding. However, some women need assistance to make sure it is all the way out or to cut off the bleeding when the capillaries from the placenta tear off from the capillaries of your uterus. Messy business.
By this point, you have a baby on your chest and possibly stitches in your vagina.
Let’s Talk Belly Birth
That is, IF you were able to give birth vaginally. You MAY end up having a Caesarean section, which will go something like this:
If you go into labor before the c-section, you will experience much of the discomfort of labor and not a lot of the mental preparation for going into major surgery. Yes—a c-section is major abdominal surgery and you should prepare yourself for some significant recovery time.
When you and the doctor decide it’s time for a caesarean, you will get prepped for surgery and wheeled into the operating room where they will strap your arms out to the side like Jesus on the cross, but lying down. They will stick you with lots and lots and lots of medication until you can barely say your name. They will speak to you slowly and intentionally to help you understand what is going on. The doctor will slice open your belly at your underwear line (between your belly button and pubic bone) and pull out your baby. Once they clean up the baby and cut out the placenta, they will place the baby on your chest if you request it. You will be mostly high and trying not to freak out over the fact that your insides are open to the world and vulnerable.
As you are trying to focus on the miracle of birth, you will feel the doctor or doctors tugging on your abdomen like a full-on game of tug-of-war. It will not be a gentle sewing up, you will feel tugging and pulling and pushing of your uterus and skin until they can get you closed up again. If it’s your first c-section, the whole birth may take a couple of hours. If it’s your second or third, add a couple of hours to each one because cutting through scar tissue takes much longer than cutting through virgin tissue.
You will now have a baby on your chest and stitches in your belly.
Stage 5: Lactating (Birth to Pre-Weaned) [Optional]
Immediately upon giving birth, your body is expected to provide a first meal or two for your baby in the form of colostrum. Some women can extract colostrum from their breasts weeks before giving birth. Some can’t extract it even after giving birth. If you can’t, like me, your baby will be starving and you will need to supplement his or her diet with donated human breastmilk or formula until your own milk comes in, which could take 3-5 days of the baby suckling on your breasts (usually longer for women who gave belly births).
Let’s Talk Nursing
Nursing is a little like being a dairy cow. You eat to make milk, your baby drinks your milk from your breasts, and if you overproduce, you express (or pump it Hakaa or ladybug) your breasts to collect the extra milk, and store it for when you can’t breastfeed (or, like one friend, donate the extra to a human milk bank.) Some women go crazy about storing large amounts of frozen breastmilk so that their baby can breastfeed long past the time they stop producing milk.
Let’s Talk Pumping
If you and your baby don’t figure out how to make the magic of nursing happen, then you have the choice of exclusively pumping. This is when you really start feeling like a dairy cow. You hook up a machine, one to each breast, every 3-5 hours to extract approximately 8 ounces of milk (4 from each breast). Usually, your dominant side’s breast produces much more than the other side. Weird, huh?
If you can’t breastfeed or pump on time, you become engorged and have to manually extract milk with your hands until you are able to pump. If your repeatedly become engorged, your breasts can get sick and painful. Your nipples will very likely get raw or blistered at some point.
If you are like the 25-50% of the population that struggles with breastfeeding, you will probably experience some mommy guilt or feeling like you’re already failing as a mom. People like you and me may benefit from a practical reality check like the one that the Holy Spirit gave to me.
Let’s Talk Weaning
Girlfriend! Please learn from my mistake and wean yourself from nursing or pumping slooooooowly! Starting, controlling, and stopping lactation takes a whole heck-of-a-lot of hormones! Quick changes in hormones will make you feel craaaaazy, so the longer you give yourself to shift lactation gears, the less crazy you will feel. Try to take around 3 weeks to wean yourself off of your baby nursing or your breast pump… not 3 days!
If you don’t have your baby suckle on your breasts, your milk will probably not come in and you will skip this stage and go straight to stage 6.
Stage 6: Postpartum Bonding (Often Concurrent With Stage 5) [Optional]
This usually occurs for the first four weeks postpartum when you can’t keep your hands off of your husband and him off of you. The bonding hormones go through the roof between mom, dad, and baby so that you all want to stay together despite the difficulty of adjusting to a new baby, not sleeping, not having sex (for at least six weeks), and possibly not moving much due to stitches or tears (for at least a week). The house is probably a mess and no one has slept more than 3 hours at a time since going into labor but you’re happy and you wish you could have sex.
Stage 7: Post-partum (Weaned & Back to Menstruating) [Optional]
Once you acquire a stage 3 body, you will eventually end up in a stage 7 body, even if you are not able to give birth and/or lactate. (And if you do go from stage 3 to 7, I’m so sorry for any pain you may have experienced on the journey here.) This is when your body is trying to recover from the tremendous work of growing a baby human inside and outside your body.
Let’s Talk Pelvic Floor
If you gave birth, your body has probably healed from the acute effects of birth—like tears around your vagina or stitches on your belly—but may still be healing from the chronic effects, like a weakened core or pelvic floor. This is the time to go to a pelvic floor physical therapist. Go even if you don’t think you need to go, because if you are in the 85% of the population who wasn’t just naturally made to have babies with ease, then you need to go!
Just go to pelvic PT.
Did I mention you need to go to a pelvic physical therapist?
Let’s Talk Soul Support
This may be the most important thing I write in this article, so please pay attention. I believe that the psychiatric community does not know squat about baby blues, postpartum depression (PPD), or postpartum anxiety (PPA). These experiences happen for a reason, and the reason is that you had childhood or are having adult experiences that make the idea of having a kid painful for you in some way. That’s because the act of having a child is like one big old trigger for all of the trauma from your childhood! I believe that God made our brains to do this—to review our hurts from childhood—so that we heal them and thus don’t repeat them. Unfortunately, most psychiatrists or psychologists who write about it online seem to wave off PPD or PPA as a hiccup: “Oh well, it just happens to some people; you can just take some meds for it and it’ll probably go away on its own, eventually.”
THAT IS NOT A HELPFUL ANSWER!
Did you experience abuse or neglect in your childhood? Then PPD or PPA is very, very, very likely because you probably still have childhood trauma.
Did you lose a parent? Or a sibling? Then PPD or PPA is very likely for you.
Maybe your childhood was generally idyllic but you always got put in timeout when you played in the house, because you got things dirty? Then it’s no wonder why you grow up and start experiencing PPA in your pregnancy or postpartum stages. (Because being taught you can’t make mistakes without punishment as a kid will lead to anxiety about parenting as an adult.)
Are you in an abusive or neglectful relationship? Or in poverty? Or a single parent? PPA or PPD is much, much more likely for you because your life is much harder than a two-parent family.
And all of the hormonal effects of PPD or PPA (including cortisol, insulin, serotonin, and melatonin surges) will mess up your body’s ability to regulate its sleep, metabolism, and emotions, so everything will feel harder.
The good news is that you can get therapy, go to support groups, and seek out community services even before you give birth so that you are not alone in this new parenting experience. How you allow thoughts to stay in your brain also will decide how long or short your PPA or PPD is.
Let’s Talk Sleep
Sleeping through the night is practically impossible for a new mother. Your brain literally changes shape and becomes way more attuned to the tiniest little noises your baby makes. And if you’ve been lactating for a while, your brain may have lost the habit of sleeping through the night. It’s okay, you can regain this habit but you will need to train your brain.
First, you need to wean your baby from night feeds. Most babies don’t need to eat at night past 6 weeks old but may be enjoying the comfort or the experience of a midnight breast, bottle, or cuddle. If you reduce the cuddles to in-bed pats, and water down the feeds slowly until your baby is only drinking water, you will be amazed that your baby will probably stop waking up in the middle of the night.
Second, you need to drown out sounds. Move your baby to his/her own room, and turn up the white noise in your own room. Take turns with your spouse on who gets to wear ear plugs that night and who gets to pay attention to the baby monitor.
Third, you need to guard your sleep area from all stress. Don’t work on your laptop or phone in bed. Don’t fight with your spouse in bed. Don’t eat in bed. You may even want to consider not having sex in the same bed in which you sleep (if sex has been painful or stressful for you) until it gets better.
Let’s Talk Sex
Sex.
Passing a baby through the same canal that your spouse enters during sex is bound to have some side effects that need to be addressed. For some fortunate women, having a vaginal birth makes their vaginal canal more sensitive and eventually rewires nerve endings in the canal to increase sexual pleasure with their spouses (probably a side effect of all the baby bonding hormones, too). This is certainly God’s ideal.
But for some women, their desire to have sex completely dies after having their first baby. This is usually because giving birth is also one big old trigger for any kind of sexual trauma that a woman has experienced, including passive sexual grooming by the media, anytime she had sex with her spouse to be a “good wife” even though she didn’t want to, etc. If this is you, marriage therapy and/or sex therapy is for you. (Some people get diagnosed with secondary vaginismus, which is explained in this amazing, hope-filled podcast.)
Sexual healing takes time and effort, but it is very possible and certainly worth the effort! I mean, God made sex to feel amazing and to drastically bind a man and a woman together in body, soul, and spirit. If your experience is less than God’s best, then ask God for your next step to get to God’s best.
Let’s Talk Skin
Just like your favorite leather shoes will eventually change shape to accommodate the pressure exerted by your feet in them, so will your body (and especially skin) change shape to accommodate the pressure exerted by pregnancy, lactation, and gravity upon it. This usually comes in the form of stretch marks on hips, thighs, belly, and breasts, as well as sagging belly and breasts. This can be a huge shock to women who already have body image issues, but it doesn’t have to be.
First, how much your skin stretches and sags is dependent on how much and how quickly it had to “inflate” to accommodate your body’s changes. That means less weigh gain and subsequent loss (as well as a slower, more steady gain and loss) leads to less stretching and sagging. Same with breasts: going from full-time breastfeeding to weaned in three days will probably cause your breast cells to deflate and your breasts to sag more than if you took three weeks. Working with a pregnancy nutritionist to keep your body well nourished and your weight under control will be worth every single penny!
Really, though… this person will be a game-changer if they know their job well.
Second, keeping your skin conditioned with belly butter or skin oil can work wonders! When God told interrupted me at the department store to point out the Shea Moisture belly oil for use on my skin, I was not a believer in the importance of oil. But I rubbed it on my breasts and belly daily—and got zero stretch marks on them. Where I didn’t use the oil, I got stretch marks: on my hips and thighs. Now I know!
Oh, another unexpected change in your skin may include an increase in skin tags, which are benign growths resulting from higher than average levels of estrogen. Insulin resistance and obesity also apparently increase the likelihood of skin tags. These may disappear after you give birth and/or lose the baby weight.
Let’s Talk Weight
If you gained more than 20 or 30 lbs in your pregnancy, chances are you didn’t lose all of the extra weight you gained through breastfeeding. Some women are blessed to drop all of their pregnancy weight through breastfeeding but that certainly is not everyone. For the rest of us, you’ll need to get your body healthy, strong, and in weight-loss mode. The way that worked well for me was counting macros on a high-protein Paleo diet. I used a weight loss coach who was also a lactation consultant, who knew the effect of women’s postpartum hormones on weight loss. It was worth every penny. Next time, I will rehire this person to help me manage my pregnancy weight gain, thereby getting me ahead of the power curve.
Let’s Talk Strength & Stamina
Chances are that you will not have the ability to do the same exercises that you could do before you got pregnant. You will probably have to build your strength and stamina back up, especially for anything that requires strong abs (remember, your standby muscles pretty much turned to mush to allow your belly to grow during pregnancy). One way to mitigate that is to do back and side strengthening exercises throughout your pregnancy.
But if you’re otherwise in good shape, your stamina may actually be better than before you got pregnant since your blood is on overdrive keeping you and another person well-oxygenated.
Stage 8: Peri-menopause
You know you’re entering perimenopause (the stage in which your estrogen and progesterone levels reduce) when it becomes harder to manage your thoughts and emotions, and your body no longer responds well to the exercise you were giving it before. You may also have less regular periods or difficulty conceiving the way you used to if—like me—you are still trying to grow your family into yours 40s. Not all women start perimenopause in their 40s but if you have a history of hormone imbalance (think cortisol from PTSD, insulin from prediabetes, etc.), then perimenopause is more likely to start earlier for you. Think of this time like a longer, slower, reverse puberty.
As a woman, you probably don’t need to go running as much and you probably need to lift weights and walk more than you do, if you live an American lifestyle. Maintaining an even blood sugar and stress level is also hugely important to not feeling so crazy.
There are lots of TedTalks on feeling beautiful and working with your body in this stage of life like this one.
Stage 9: Menopause
You have entered menopause when your body has stopped ovulating. Surprisingly, it is still possible, though not probable, for you to conceive. (Remember that Sarai in the Jewish Bible was 90 years old and way into menopause when she got pregnant with and birthed Isaac.) Your bones tend to become more fragile due to lowered estrogen that affects calcium uptake, so taking measures to counter bone loss is important. Strength training and regular cardio will keep you in good shape, as will a life-time of good bone positioning (think good posture, healthy pillows, etc).
In this season of life, you become the most like yourself—that is, your inhibitions about saying things others may not like go away, and you start saying all the hints you’ve been secretly thinking all your life.
The most important thing that will make this season of life beautiful is living a life of pursuing joy like these amazing centenarians (women aged 100 or older!) Joy produces happy molecules (like endorphins) that have all kinds of positive and healing effects on your body. It’s true that the joy of the Lord is our strength, and all real joy (that isn’t secretly harmful) is from God, /so go ahead and enjoy your life! Your future self will thank you.
Conclusion
There you go! Nine perfectly normal stages of a woman’s body, each of which can be scary if you don’t make space for it, and each of which can be wondrous and beautiful if you do.
