Wait or Weight

This is about to get real vulnerable for me, I have been contemplating this for a couple months now and finally decided I needed to get this off my heart! I have had so many lovely ladies be blessed with sweet babies around the same time as I have and a common thing said amongst them is I need to get this baby weight off... I feel their pain I have struggled for years with feeling like a stupid number or size defines me. In high school I went through some very difficult eating issues that led to self hate and led to me feeling unworthy of love. I never felt good enough and I settled in a lot of aspects in my life. The issues I had with loving myself led to me making choices I wouldn’t have made if I believed in myself just a little bit! After years of struggling and many hard trails, I was able to get to a healthy weight and a healthy head space. I finally learned to love myself and not abuse myself! I never saw that all unraveling once my life had so perfectly fallen into place. When I met Cole I was in such a good place I even remember reading a sweet text between him and my baby sister when she thanked him for making me so happy and that she hadn’t seen me this happy in years! Life was exactly where I wanted and needed it to be. Little did I know the next 6 years were going to challenge and change me in ways I didn’t see coming... When we started trying for a family and we weren’t having success fertility hormones were introduced and like most hormones my body loved them in the sense it was like I enjoyed 10 pieces of cake a night! The hormones I had to take reeked havoc on my body at first it was just 5-10 pounds no big deal right hormones do that to you. But after the hormones worked and we got pregnant with our first and lost him. My body not only had that 5-10 pounds but it had another 9 from pregnancy and a few more that was from the grief of losing our sweet Bird. Fast forward 7 months 5 treatments later my sweet body had held on to a little more weight from those 5 treatments and we found out we were expecting again. As many of you know we didn’t have success with this pregnancy either and we lost our daughter Ember. Add on another few emotional pounds! After we lost Ember I went into a dark place and started to have old habits creep back into my life I had an extremely scary moment where I was crying in the bathroom after getting rid of my meal for the day when I was so down on myself knowing that purging wasn’t going to fix anything it wasn’t going to make me love myself, or help us get pregnant and keep a pregnancy, but it was going to make both things worse. For a moment I didn’t care I wanted it to go away, all the pain we had been through all the suffering I had taken on! I struggled with feeing like my life was of value for a good chunk of the first few years of my marriage I thought the thought of how could a man who wants kids love a woman who can’t provide them at least 5 times a day. I convinced myself over and over I wasn’t worth fighting for! Thankfully this sweet man saw what I couldn’t and stuck it out through the years of me constantly sobbing and self harming! The next step took my life in a direction I needed through a good friend I was able to get the resources I needed to make sure I didn’t let my eating issues spiral down the dark rabbit hole they were slowly going down! I got to a healthy place with my relationship with food I had healthily lost the weight I had gained from fertility treatments and the loses we dealt with! Things were looking up and I was feeling hopeful, the next two years I can’t even count/remember how many treatments we tried with no success! The longer the time passed without a proscribe test the further I got from remembering how much I had overcome and how loving myself was so important. Each treatment seemed to fight against all the hard work I had put in to have a healthy out look on self love... It was like the one thing that could help me reach a goal I so desperately wanted completely

undid all the work I had done on another goal! This battle continued through the 4 rounds of ivf it took to get pregnant with Ridgley and the weight gain continued through that and really hit hard between the lose of Moran and when we got pregnant with Ridg. We got pregnant with Moran in January of 2018 and I carried her for 9 weeks one fun perk my body does when I get pregnant is I always gain 9 pounds almost instantly (thank you pcos) so with sweet Moran I did just that and when we lost her I put on some more due to emotions being way over the top and I was drowning! Then as soon as we had the clear to transfer again we did and thankfully we got pregnant and it took! The weight gain that came then never bothered me I was grateful for every pound because it meant I had a healthy growing babe! After having Ridgley I was blessed to loose the 40 pounds I had gained within the first month! That left me at a pre-pregnancy weight but not a pre-fertility treatment weight! The next month of my sweet babies life I found myself crying often trying to figure out how I was going to show this sweet little girl how to love herself and not to define her worth off of silly worldly things like I had done my whole life! One morning as I was doing this what I would called routine of tears I was thinking about the weight I had put on during the last 6 years of trials and how I almost felt like letting go of it and loosing it was removing the memories of my sweet babies that I worked so hard for sacrificing my body so I could try and get them here! I felt if I lost the 9 pounds I gained with Bird, the 9 pounds I gain with Ember and the 9 pounds I gain with Moran and all the other pounds I gained doing fertility treatments I would be slowly shedding the memories of my babies that weren’t here with me! They were my reminders they were here with us and letting them go would be forgetting! I remember crying so hard that I didn’t think I was going to stop! Once I finally was able to calm down and manage my emotions I was able to remind myself that being happy doesn’t mean we didn’t love them that we forgot about the pain or that we moved on it means we are surviving until this life is over and we can be a whole family again! So for the last month I have been working mentally on telling myself it is ok to let go of my fertility/pregnancy loss weight it doesn’t define my angel babies! What defines our family is that we are eternal and we will be together again! The things I need now in this life are to be able to love myself and to show my sweet daughter a healthy way to treat our bodies! I have been at both ends of the pendulum where I have starved and treated my body horribly to where I am now harboring extra so I won’t forget, and at the end of the day I realize one thing, we need to have love! We need to have love for ourselves and love for others! In a world full of judgment it is so hard to do this we don’t love ourselves because the world expects different and we find ourselves not showing love for the rest of the world cause we are picking apart others! So starting today I am being open and honest with myself and showing myself the grace I need to work through my emotions and get to a healthier place to be the example to my daughter I need to be! Mommas who have just had babies too love yourself and your amazing body that carried this sweet life or lives into this world! Show yourself some grace and work towards your goals in a healthy way, not just about a number or a size but about loving your wonderful body that did something amazing! All ladies (and gents) need to remember to love themselves and the beautiful body God created for them and to respect and love it in an honorable and healthy way!