Belly 2.0

In my head, it's still Belly 1.0.

Yesterday I was feeling warm and I was about to do some exercises indoors. I put on a sports bra and a pair of leggings, and I was looking for a top to wear when I realized...I got my belly fixed. It doesn't stick out anymore. It's still a bit swollen, normal for the first year after surgery. 

For what I went through after that surgery, I should be wearing crop tops every day of my freaking life. So I just left the shirt off.

It was SO WEIRD. I have hidden my belly my entire life. I mean, I wore bikinis pre-kids, but I didn't feel great about it. Even when thin and young, I had a pooch. 

I felt so strange and uncomfortable just wearing a sports bra and exposing my middle. My family came home, and even with just them, I was so self-conscious and almost put on a shirt, but I forced myself to go bare belly until bedtime. I sat at the table and ate dinner in my sports bra and I might as well have been stark naked. 

Old habits of body shame die hard! I'm not skinny or anything, I actually gained some weight after surgery because they say not to try to *lose* weight until everything stabilizes. I mean, you're not supposed to gain weight either, but that's the direction I went with not exercising during recovery and then eating bread and desserts in the Netherlands and getting hooked on sugar again. So now I'm puffy, but with hard abs. It's crazy. 

I felt so skinny right after my surgery, like a wasp. I felt like they sucked my whole middle away. So now I feel a bit thicc again, but I don’t know if it’s relative to how slim I felt right after surgery while also wearing compression garments, or because of swelling/weight gain and not wearing compression garments anymore, or what.

Normally if I gained weight, it would start in the belly, in front, and expand out from there. This time I couldn't really tell that I had gained weight until I got on the scale, saw I had gone up a surprising 7 pounds, and noticed that my arms and legs were fluffier (and my joints more achy and less bendy). I always used my belly as a gauge before. Something else to get used to. Now I need to use like, armpit fat or something as a gauge. Or the less bendy joints. 

I'm on a mission now to be more aware of my eating and cut out sugar again, move more, but also to let go of the belly shame. It was so weird yesterday to feel so self-conscious and ugly, and then look down and see nothing hanging over my pants. My mind has not caught up to my body. Again, not like my body is perfect, but it looks a whole lot better than it did, even with extra weight. 

It works better too, it's amazing having a functional core after well, I don't know that I ever did have a functional core. I think I always had a dysfunctional core, even before kids. Having kids just pulled it farther apart and made it ten times worse. 

It still feels weird around my incision sometimes, and on my sides, so I'm taking it slow, but when I do ab exercises now, I can actually do them! I could not engage my core at all before surgery. My back did all the work. My front was like, NOPE. Not here for this! I could pull in my upper abs, but the lower abs starting at my navel were like, "Don't tell me what to do, I told you I'm not participating."

I have to keep telling myself, I don't look like Frankenstein anymore. I don't have a protruding dysfunctional belly anymore. This belly has been REPAIRED, and that process was absolute torture, but I am mostly healed from it and I need to start enjoying the results, even if they are not perfectly supermodel, and lose some of this ridiculous shame and weirdness. 

When I was really suffering, really in pain during recovery, I'd tell myself through gritted teeth and tears, "When I recover from this bullshit, I am going to wear a belly shirt every fucking day, like a high schooler!" 

Which as I said, I totally have not. And I think it would be weird if I did. Or who knows, maybe it would be awesome? But probably chilly. I still feel best with my abs covered and supported by high-waisted underwear and pants. I still don't own a single crop top or (shudder) low-waisted pants. But from time to time, I need to practice NOT feeling embarrassed about my middle and just follow through on the intention that got me through the pain of recovery. 

Let me just be clear…I think everyone should feel free to expose their body without shame, no matter what kind of body they have. I should have felt okay to show my belly before, when it was poochy and saggy, because poochy and saggy bellies are absolutely normal, especially for 54-year-old women who have had several kids. But, I felt ashamed and I always wanted to cover it up. There is absolutely no reason for me to feel ashamed now, and yet I still feel residual belly shame and weirdness and I DON’T LIKE IT.

Every girl under 25 walks around with her belly out all day every day (ok, maybe a slight exaggeration, but it does seem like that at times), and I can’t even do it in my own house without cringing and feeling self-conscious. What in the world is going on.

So here, have some BELLY! Belly 2.0! She is still very shy, but I am introducing her around so that she can get over herself. 

I will even show you my new belly button and my garment lines. I am cringing, but here we go. I’m doing this for Post-surgical Laura.

Girl, you made it! Sleeping at night in a bed now instead of a lounger! Beating opiate withdrawal and massage-induced infections and everything!

I’m not going to show you my incision, because that’s a bit much. It’s fine. It’s purple, but it will eventually turn silvery-flesh white, like my hip replacement incision.

There are some lumps right underneath it (that I can feel but can’t really see). When I went to get them checked out, my surgeon was puzzled. “Huh, I don’t usually see patients get this.” Of course. I am the outlier for every fucking thing, apparently.

He aspirated the biggest lump with a needle to check it out, and it was apparently dissolved stitch goo. The dissolvable stitches break down over time, and in some people they disappear completely fairly quickly, but in my case, I’m still breaking them down 5 months later. Eventually they will disappear completely.

Now that I know what they are, it’s not a big deal. I would be more worried about the stitches breaking down too early than later, I guess. My surgeon said that the stitches are very thick and strong, and where I feel the lumps, those are where he made knots, at regular intervals. The knots take longer to break down.

He warned me that my body might try to push them to the surface and expel them, in which case I will see a pimple sort of thing appear, and it will pop and spit out whatever stitch goo is left.

Kind of fascinating. That might actually be satisfying, but NO I DO NOT WANT THAT, body. Just keep working on the stitch goo internally.