Before you read this, I think I should tell you why I wrote it.

The other day, my friend Erin wrote a post about her "mom bod," to explain why she created this sweatshirt on glam | camp. She showed photos of her postpartum stomach, described how it can happily hold in its folds a package of mum-mums (mine can, too; I tried). She talked about how poorly she used to treat her body, how poorly others used to treat it, and how her relationship to it changed once she became a mother.  She suggested that I also write about my own experience with my body, and how becoming a mother has affected it. I didn't want to, because it sounded frightening...and then I realized that I had to, because it sounded frightening. When you're in tears before your fingertips even touch the keyboard, you know that you've hit on something that you need to get to the bottom of.

So I thought and thought, and what I realized was that for me it hasn't been a journey of learning to love the curves and the shape of my body (it's been that, too, but that's another story for another day) as much as it has been learning to treasure the very stuff of it, the meat and bones and blood. The life of it.

I wouldn't say that my relationship with my body has, historically, been an especially positive one. Not because I don't "like" it, in the "do you like what you see when you look in the mirror?" sense (I do, more on some days than on others, but generally I do), but because it's always felt like a danger zone, a virtual ocean of opportunities to be wounded.