One of my dearest friends in the whole world gave birth to her first baby earlier this year.
She’s truly one of the smartest and most capable women I know. She’s kind, and generous, and she has a wicked sense of humour.
She is also physically very very beautiful, like, cover of Vogue Magazine beautiful.
And yet she is struggling to come to grips with the changes in her body. Her beautiful body, that grew a beautiful baby, that laboured and birthed, that breastfed.
I wish she could see what the rest of us see when we look at her, a wonderful awesome (as in, inspires awe) woman.
Of course, my dear friend is not alone.
It's hard for many of us to come to grips with our post baby bodies. That's not a surprise, given the propensity of tabloid media to feature women who miraculously snap back to shape three hours after giving birth. (Okay, I'm being unreasonable. Three days then.)
Enter The Mid Drift Movement, "Our purpose is to change society’s unrealistic expectations of what a mother’s body should look like and to embrace motherhood’s physical transformations.
"Mid Drift aims to start a fresh conversation about the realities of motherhood, the truth about the postpartum body, and the challenges faced by women and their partners as they encounter society’s unfair expectations."
The Mid Drift Movement; exposing the soft underbelly of motherhood. Post continues after video...
The team write on their website, "Mid Drift is a feature length documentary film about postpartum experience around the world. America’s obsession with “body after baby” is harmful and we want to shift the conversation to center on the incredible experiences and community surrounding motherhood.
"We believe that, in order to change the conversation, we must learn from other cultures that are serving new mothers in a more positive way.
"We plan to visit several countries from around the globe to discover how postpartum body image and experience varies among cultures."
To learn more about The Mid Drift Movement and their documentary, or to share your story, you can visit them at their website or follow them on Facebook.
How do you feel about your body, post baby?