I wanted my pre-baby body back. Then I realised it hadn’t gone anywhere

I had Cyrus at 40, and somewhere among the nappies, broken sleep and the enormous responsibility of keeping a tiny human alive, I started wondering when my old body was going to turn up again.

Cyrus is ten now, so I can look back at those early months with considerably more perspective than I had at the time. Back then, I wasn’t particularly interested in perspective. I wanted my clothes to fit. I wanted to look in the mirror and recognise myself, and to feel that pregnancy had ended and, physically at least, I was becoming me again.

Obviously I knew having a baby would change my body. What I hadn’t appreciated was how odd it would feel to recognise my own body while feeling slightly unfamiliar with it. My stomach looked different, my fitness had changed. Clothes I’d worn before pregnancy became an unofficial test of whether I was getting back to “normal”.

There is a phrase women hear after having a baby: getting your body back. I understood it completely because I wanted mine back too.

The body I thought I was getting back

My wardrobe wasn’t particularly helpful. There were clothes in there belonging to the woman I’d been before pregnancy, and every time something didn’t fit I treated it as evidence that I hadn’t quite made it back yet.

A waistband is brutally unsentimental. It doesn’t care that you’ve had a baby or spent half the night awake, it either fastens or it doesn’t. Mine frequently didn’t.

At that point, exercise wasn’t really about becoming stronger or looking after my future health. If I’m truthful, I wanted to look more like the woman I’d been before Cyrus. The problem was that I now had Cyrus.

Trying to look after myself had to fit around looking after a baby who couldn’t have cared less about my plans for the day. I made some changes to what I ate and drank and tried to find time to exercise, but mostly, I got on with being a new mum.

Then there was Persian food

Food in our British-Persian family has never just been fuel.

There is tea and shirini, family meals and foods I associate with particular people and occasions. Trying to turn all of that into calories to be counted or things I shouldn’t eat felt really miserable.  After all, nobody goes into a Persian patisserie with nutritional restraint.

Eventually I stopped treating every sweet thing I ate as evidence that I’d somehow failed. I could have shirini without writing off the rest of the day and I could enjoy Persian food. It wasn’t much of a diet plan, but it was easier to live with.

Exercise changed things

When I started exercising again at the community centre and doing workouts at home, I discovered pregnancy had changed more than the bits I could see in the mirror.

Things were harder.

My fitness wasn’t where it had been and neither was my strength. That could be frustrating, but it also gave me something completely different to concentrate on. Instead of only noticing what my body looked like, I started noticing what it could do. Something that felt difficult became easier. I could do a little more. I could feel myself getting stronger.

And exercise gave me something else, time that was mine. For a while I wasn’t somebody’s mum or thinking about the next thing that needed doing. I was just exercising.

My body hadn’t gone anywhere

This is the bit I see differently now.

The whole idea of “getting your body back” suggests pregnancy somehow takes it away from you.

Mine hadn’t disappeared. It had carried Cyrus and given birth to him at 40. Of course it looked different afterwards. That doesn’t mean I adored every change.

I don’t think women should be expected to gaze lovingly at their post-pregnancy stomachs and feel grateful every time they spot a stretch mark either. I wanted some things to change and there are things I’d still change now.

But wanting to be fitter wasn’t the same as wanting to remove every piece of evidence that pregnancy had happened to me. It took me a while to separate the two.

So did I ever get my body back?

Not in the way I originally imagined.

The woman tentatively exercising after having Cyrus had no idea how important fitness would eventually become to her. I became much more interested in being stronger and fitter, and in the satisfaction I get when my body manages something I couldn’t do before.

That was what I’d been trying to get back all along. Not my old waist or a number on the scales. I wanted to feel like myself, and I didn’t need my old body back to do that.

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Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.