No one wanted a gorgeous post birth photo shoot more than I. Adorer of fashion, collector of glamourous pyjamas, I imagined an elegant image of me holding my perfect baby. But this was not my fate. My weight climbed post caesarean; my father told me I resembled an American football player. Photos show a breathless me with a bruised newborn who had struggled in the birth canal. Two days later, giving my baby her first bath, I gasped for breath, my extremities swelled with oedema. We rushed to the emergency room. I was in heart failure with a life-threatening peripartum cardiomyopathy. Doctors treated me with intense medication and in forty-eight hours, I lost two stone of water weight. My heart started functioning again. Washed out and weary, I smiled for the camera as my husband snapped a photo.
I shared very few pictures of those moments with anyone. Fourteen years on, scrolling through my Instagram feed of stunning images of mums today, I remember back. Oh, the baby was beautiful! Once her cone-shaped head became round and the bruise on her eye disappeared, many photos of her hit the inboxes of friends and family. What I didn’t share was the reality of the experience.
The baby boom of Instagram fills feeds with gorgeous newborns under the filter of a glowing, consistent aesthetic. I’m charmed and entranced. Anyone following these women could believe the perfection is real. Many Instagram mummies have hundreds of thousands of followers—much more that my puny 2006 database of friends and family. When we can’t even sit at our mum's house to chat over a cup of tea, these Instagrammers are our community. Women look at these images and captions for a sense of belonging.
Mainstream culture continues to amplify unrealistic expectations of women. To be perfect mothers, we must be beautiful and doting. We must erase the women we were to become better, sacrificing versions of ourselves. I want to tell these women, don’t give in; flip the expectation on its head. I challenge those with great aesthetics to try it. Keep the filter that is your brand, but show me cabbage leaves on boobs trying to wean. Show me partners sharing the work or show me the work they won’t do, and the tension that causes. With curated colour codes and blurred background shots, glorify the real. There is power in that reality. There is solace for your communities in knowing they are not alone.
When I started writing my novel, Under the Light of the Italian Moon, I was pregnant without the experience of birth. Upon finishing fourteen years later, I was the mother of a teenager. It wasn’t only the shiny, happy memories I called upon to write about a woman raising her children alone during the rise of fascism and WWII; it was the soul crushing and the emptying. I wanted to show life in all its profoundness—paying tribute to women in the most authentic way—by presenting motherhood and womanhood, unedited.
Looking back, I wish I’d appreciated the beauty of the moments we lived through: my husband taking every night feeding while I found my way back to health, my mother taking over when I could do no more – the guilt when the love for my child competed with the excitement of getting back to my career and achievements outside of motherhood. The messy and uncertain moments, the thoughts I wasn’t “supposed” to have — those were what made me human.
We are powerful not because we are beautiful, but in our strength, in our ability to bring life, in the fact that motherhood alone does not define us. When we are finally willing to display the glory and mess of womanhood, we realise our power. Nothing is more gorgeous than that.
#beautyinimperfection
Under the Light of the Italian Moon by Jennifer Anton is out now.