'I used my pregnancy to disguise my body image issues'

Getting bullied when I was growing up didn’t leave much time for worrying about my body, and I went through my teens and twenties with a relatively positive body image.

So once I’d had Oliver, shat my pants and wet myself, I was facing unknown territory about my relationship with my body. For the first time in my life, I felt that my body was betraying me. While there were many times throughout my life that I didn’t like my body (when I was overweight) I was always able to accept responsibility and make the necessary changes to get back on track. But when I tried to get my body back into the shape it was in before I had Oliver, it wouldn’t budge. I got frustrated. Really frustrated. For someone who likes control, being out of it wasn’t much fun.

With a new healthy baby I should have been on top of the world, but there was something weighing me down, the thoughts I was having about my disgusting and hideous body. The jelly belly, angry looking, red stretch marks all over my tummy, and nipples the size of dinner plates. And to top it all off I was surrounded by images in magazines with headlines such as ‘Baby bliss’, ‘How I got my body back’ and ‘Sexy new Mums’. What? Sex and new mothers in the same sentence, this can’t be right?

There were many highs in those first few months of being a mum, I truly adored it and I was deliriously in love with Oliver. Motherhood was everything that I wanted it to be with a dose of extras that I didn’t expect.

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I spent the next fifteen months battling hard with the unrelenting ping pong conversation in my head, which kept informing me that I was fat, disgusting, gross and a complete sexual turn-off, and then just before my body image issues became a mental health issue, I was pregnant again, this time with Cruz.

Phew. I could now pretend that my hotdog stomach was an early sign of a growing baby and I was heading back into a world of pregnancy and a big delightful growing tummy. My jelly belly was going to be round and beautiful again. All feelings of being sad and sorry about the way I looked disappeared. I was now a vessel, my body had a purpose and all I needed to focus on was giving it what it needed, and sometimes giving it what it desired, liked copious amounts of chocolate and meat pies.

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When Cruz was born, however, all the same feelings I had when Oliver arrived came flooding back. I mourned my pregnant body, and hated my post-birth body, this time even worse than before. Whether it was the sleep deprivation or that my body had changed even more, I was in a really crap place. To make things worse, I felt so incredibly guilty for being so self-absorbed, crying on the bathroom floor because my body didn't look like it used to when I was so lucky to have two healthy beautiful babies.

Then my negative self image began to affect those around me, I would often ask Mat to go to social gatherings without me. He never wanted to but I often pleaded with him to go alone as I didn’t want to see anyone. I would cry in changing rooms and in bed at night. I would say things to myself that I wouldn’t say to my worst enemy.

One night when Cruz was about six months old, Mat and I went out for dinner and had a couple of drinks. It was the first time in a long time that I had had a couple of drinks (I’m not a drinker, I could go literally months without having one) and I was feeling slightly tipsy. When we got back home, Mat sensed my relaxed mood and before we knew it, it was on. With a couple of drinks under my belt, I didn’t care so much about how I looked, and when Mat said to me, ‘We aren’t using protection, will it be okay?’ I said, ‘Yes! GO FOR IT, it will be fine.’

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I’ll never forget the moment I looked at that blue line and said to myself out loud, ‘It is going to be a girl, and she is here for a reason.’ It’s only been in the past couple of years that I’ve realised the enormity of that moment. Without Mikaela the Body Image Movement wouldn’t exist.

So my body image issues were once again disguised by another pregnancy, however this time around I thought proactively about how I would deal with my body loathing after the baby was born. I couldn’t do round three in front of the mirror, pulling my stomach fat in disgust, telling myself I was gross. I decided that I was going to get surgery to fix my body after this pregnancy.

It was raining on the day of the surgeon’s appointment, and we pulled up in a car park right out the front in Hutt Street, Adelaide. Mat was with me and for good reason. I’m one of these people that doesn’t read fine print and if I was ordered to sign my life away that day I would have because I was so excited, so delirious and so ready. Oh so ready. I had been waiting years for this appointment, I had given birth to three children in three and a half years, I had fed over four thousand meals from my breasts and I had suffered prolonged physical pain and emotional distress.

It feels really weird being in a room with a strange man handling your breasts as your husband looks on. Not exactly the threesome you might fantasise about. The surgeon asked me to let my stomach out, I did, and then he said, ‘And some more,’ and I finally let it go. I look under my brow to see the reaction on Mat’s face. My stomach is GIGANTIC, I could pass for a six month pregnant woman. I could have just sank into the carpet I felt so utterly mortified. But wait, there’s more.

The surgeon picked up my breasts with his thumbs and index fingers, just like he would do if he was picking up a snot-filled dirty tissue, and tells me there isn’t enough breast tissue for me to have just a breast lift, I would need to have implants as well.

He then grabbed my stomach and confirms that he’d get rid of all this (the fat and excess skin) and fix up the boobs and voilà, new body new you! I was so excited, I was like a giddy schoolgirl in love for the first time. The next ten minutes were a bit of a blur, Mat was asking all the sensible questions like, how long the surgery would take, and what were the risks. The only questions I needed answering were, ‘What’s your diary like?’ and, ‘When can you schedule my surgery in?’

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I almost skipped out of the office, I hadn’t felt this validated, excited and energised in months. All the heartache I had been through, the hours spent in agonising in front of the bathroom mirror, all the tears that were shed, all the negative feelings were going to be magically whisked away. My body was going to be fixed.

As we drove away I sensed that Mat was not sharing my jubilation. I always knew he wasn’t thrilled about me having major surgery, and if he had a choice in the matter he would have said no. But he wanted to support me, and he wanted me to feel better about my body, so he was quietly doing his best not to burst my bubble.

Going ahead with the surgery meant a lot of family sacrifices would have to be made. All of which I could totally justify because I felt that I was the one who had been sacrificing for years. Sacrificing my self-esteem, sacrificing my body, my sleep – oh the list could go on. Without it sounding like, ‘You did this so I am going to do that,’ I felt like it was my right to have surgery. I ‘deserved’ to have it.

Nothing was going to stop me from having surgery, I had made up my mind. The logistics of surgery were arranged, all I needed to do was go and have it done. I never expected a change of heart. In fact, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Everything changed in an ordinary moment. As I was watching Mikaela playing on the floor in front of me, I had an epiphany.

I’d never experienced an epiphany before but it was like a lightning bolt had come from the sky and hit the ground in front of me when this thought struck me: How am I going to teach Mikaela to love her body if I can’t do the same? Followed by an onslaught of more questions coming at me, thick and fast and unrelenting...

How am I ever going to encourage her to accept and love the parts of her body that she doesn’t like without being a walking contradiction?

If I go ahead with the surgery am I setting my daughter up for a future of body hatred and self-loathing?

In ten years time when she becomes a teenager will she want to be like her mummy and have manufactured breasts and a surgically produced flat stomach?

Am I setting her up to chase an unrealistic goal of perfection?

Will she place more value on her looks than what she achieves in life because her mummy has placed so much emphasis on her own ‘beauty’?

Like most mothers I want to protect and love my children. If I had to make a choice over their welfare or my own, there is no decision to make, they are always priority number one. I remember growing up and watching movies and when there was a life or death situation for a parent and a child, the parent would always put the child first. I always wondered about this, I used to question it: ‘Seriously, would they REALLY give up their life for their child?’ But I get it now, there is no love like the love you have for your child. I remember the birth of each of our children and that feeling of holding them for the first time. For me, it was instant love. In that very moment of looking at them for the first time, I would die for them, I would do anything for them.

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It never occurred to me until that moment that my boob job and tummy tuck would potentially affect the relationship that Mikaela has with her body as she gets older.

I didn’t want to put her in that position. I didn’t want to be the reason that she hated her body, or the reason that she wanted to change her body. I couldn’t bear to be a walking talking contradiction either, attempting to teach her to love her body if I couldn’t embrace mine. I had to be a positive role model for her. Going ahead with the surgery was not going to be the best decision for Miki.

If you are reading this and have children and did have surgery – please don’t think I’m suggesting that those who have had surgery are bad role models for their children. These were my decisions, this is my unique story and everyone has their own life story. What I am saying is that there is no room for guilt, it’s a wasted emotion, and after all we are just doing the best we can do.

This is an edited extract of Taryn Brumfitt’s book Embrace: My story from body loather to body lover ($26.99, New Holland Publishing)