After-Baby Bodies: Let’s See Your Bodies

Women are hardly prepared for how a pregnancy can change their body. This hashtag helps moms to love each other!

Stretch marks, extra pounds, sagging breasts, thin hair, depression, one shoe size more: Moms can do all this and more after a pregnancy. But we must finally stop condemning our bodies that do so much wonderful. Blogger and mother of January Harshe helps us with this.

After her fifth baby, the Texan had already gotten into the habit of reciting this mantra every day: “January, today may be your last day in life, why do you spend it hating you? Your body has given life to six people, time to cherish it.”

Finally, she started the #takebackpostpartum movement (get your postpartum back on). The six-time mother and blogger was fed up with the fact that the hashtag #postpartum was used by companies to sell stretch marks and dietary products to women.

The 35-year-old woman found..: The weeks and months after the birth of a baby are not exactly easy anyway – and instead of having to concentrate on being taut and slim again as quickly as possible, wouldn’t it be much better to celebrate what is right now?

To do that, she called on new mothers to use social media to show the bare truth. Stretch marks, bumps, sagging breasts, wrinkles where there were none before – or, in other words, everything that is retouched in magazines and advertisements – should be presented under #takebackpostpartum as what they are: part of the way on the journey to be a mother.

January Harshe wants to counter the media-controlled image drawn by women with the unretouched photos of mothers with something powerful and positive. By making bodies as visible as they are, with all their scars and shapes and in all their splendor.

So that we all learn to celebrate our bodies instead of condemning them in front of the mirror!