Secret's out: I'm unhappy with my body

Like I promised earlier, I am going to lay out my thoughts, my secrets, my inner voice.

Penelope Trunk (who I love but know that many hate) said last week: I hate that I have stories I don’t want to tell. Because I have found that almost always, the secrets we keep matter a lot to us, but they don’t matter to other people.

So, relying on the fact that you, my lovely lady readers, do not care about my secrets. So here we go.

My body has never been an issue for me. Up until puberty, I had a very basic young girl body: little fat and awkwardly disproportionate. At 16, I gained curves and breasts at the same time that I lost my virginity to the "love of my youth." It was a wonderful time for my body and my self esteem. I could do no wrong, wear no wrong and see nothing wrong.

In college, I started out thinking that my body was awesome and perfect because no one had told me otherwise. A few incidents and a few too critical "friends" made me realize that maybe I wasn't as perfectly shaped as I thought originally. Whatever. All it took was a hilarious graduate student to tell me that I was gorgeous and go for runs with me and in a few months, I was back to believing that my body was great and perfect and wonderful.

I married that man. And my body never had hurt feelings. Even when I was a little chunky (from our late night ice cream binges and our almost daily indulgence in macaroni and cheese), I felt beautiful. I felt awesome. And I acted like it.

And then I got pregnant.

I was documenting my pregnancy weight gain to be open and honest like many other pregnant bloggers. Except at the end, I gained really quickly (combined with my swelling and protein levels in my urine) and had to be induced.

For which I was thankful.

I was huge. I had gained forty-five pounds. Jesus Christ. I'd never weighed that much. Never even close. In the course of 9 months, I gained forty-five pounds.

So you can imagine my shock when the weight just melted off after the birth. I hadn't exercized, hadn't changed my diet (except to increase it) and hadn't thought much about "losing the weight." There went ten pounds, fifteen pounds, eighteen pounds, twenty pounds, twenty-five, thirty pounds.

And it has stayed at a thirty pound weight loss. Damn.

For the first time in my life, I think my body is ugly.

I've got excess weight in my arms, thighs, face and the hard-working stomach. I've got weight to lose. A lot of it. A good fifteen pounds of it. And each day, my body just stays the same. Each day, I stare down and think: how can I hide this? When will it go away? Why I am so gross? I have stretch marks, I have a belly that looks tired (because it probably is), and I have a face that's a little too chunky for my liking.

How can I hate my body?

I've never been one of those girls. I have never stood in front of the mirror hating on my reflection. I have never complained about being fat. I have never even tried starving myself or running myself into the ground. I have always loved my body, even when it wasn't that great.

And now I do. I don't know what to do with myself because I don't feel like myself. All the time I worry that people are thinking, "Gosh, she's so fat." or worse, "She's so lazy, she should have lost the weight by now." I feel like each day that separates me from July 26 is a day that I should be thinner.

And why does thin equal pretty?

I suppose that it doesn't. There's a lot of beautiful curvy girls. And I am a curvy girl - even at my thinnest. But I'm not a pretty fat girl. And I don't want to be.

My greatest fear is to lose myself in motherhood, and a huge part of why I hate how I look right now is I feel like I've lost that battle. I've lost the battle to return to the regular Alyssa. I've lost the battle to be cool and awesome.

I'm not at a point in my life where I'm comfortable making huge changes to my diet or fitness routine. I am barely sleeping enough to get by, and I am eating one handed most of the time. I feel like there's never enough time in the day for relaxing, let alone taking a thirty minute jog/walk. I feel like I'm at the bottom of an ugly pit and there's no way out.

I feel like I've failed. I've failed myself. I've failed my husband. I've failed my friends. I've failed my family. I've failed my son. I'm not who I thought I would be after all this motherhood stuff. I thought I'd bounce back to the real me, the skinny me and look and feel the same.

All the books say 9 months on, 9 months off, but it's hard to feel like 9 months is an acceptable amount of time to lose the rest.

I mean, have you seen my ass? Have you seen what I look like naked?

And the worst part is: I'm spending so much time naked. I have to spend my entire evening from 5-8pm topless cluster feeding Bradley. And then I sleep this way since I'll be up to feed him anyway. And none of my pajama pants fit well, so I just wear underwear. (As I type that, I realize I should just buy some new pants that actually fit.) It's just a constant reminder that my body isn't want I want it to be.

I don't know what will become of me or my body. I'm hoping by the time January arrives, I'll feel better about myself and I will be skinnier.

NOTE: I know my body just did something incredible - carrying and birthing a human being, but I wish it would do something else incredible - return to my previous self. And wishes aren't illegal.