Bounce back: Superstar Beyonce looks fantastic after the birth of her daughter Blue Ivy
Scarcely a week passes without a new picture of a celebrity mother being photographed looking even slimmer after the birth than she did before getting pregnant.
‘Look at us,’ these women seem to be shouting to the world. ‘See how easy it is to have a baby! Pop it out, jump on to the treadmill, starve yourself on lettuce [as Beyonce recently confessed to doing, four months after having her first child] and get right back to business.’
Well, I’m all for not letting yourself go — it’s perilously easy to lose your self-respect if you allow yourself to permanently lose your figure. But I do think it’s time we scotched this ridiculous notion that having a baby is simply a brief interruption to normal life that needs to be got over as quickly as possible.
It’s literally a life-changing event. It can make you the happiest you’ve ever been — and also the most miserable. It can empower you with the strength of ten lionesses — and bring you to your knees with bone-aching exhaustion.
So anyone who thinks she’s being modern and emancipated by nonchalantly downplaying the impact of motherhood is setting herself up for a colossal fall.
The problem is, over the past few years, the concept of needing time both to recover from the birth and bond with a new baby seems to have become as outdated as a home perm.
Take the case of hospital manager Michelle Stone, who decided to buck this insidious trend and take a full year’s maternity leave. While she was away, the woman doing her maternity cover bombarded her with emails about work — the first arrived just two days after the birth, while Michelle was still in hospital recovering from a Caesarean — and made a formal complaint against her when she failed to respond.
Life-changing event: Having a child can empower you, but also bring you to your knees with exhaustion
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