#201: "Mom bod" (& other concerns)
Good morning!
Welcome back to Dear Baby. Today’s column is loosely parenthood-themed, but also touches universal stuff like complicated sibling dynamics, changing bodies, and anticipating big life transitions. More specifically, we have a sister who doesn’t come around the kids anymore, someone struggling with their postpartum body changes, and a woman who’s unexpectedly pregnant and freaking out. I’ve gotten several questions from nervous pregnant people actually (<3), so I was happy to finally answer one and use it to talk about what I like about having a kid, distinct from the infamous “ineffable” love. Thank you for all your amazing questions this year! I’m blown away every month.
1. On an absent sister
Dear Baby,
I’m feeling very stuck in my relationship with my sister and would love any thoughts you have. I am the oldest of three girls. My middle sister and I are two years apart and were very close until she moved to LA and met her now-husband. She is a former college athlete who has (in my opinion) poured her energy into becoming a workaholic. They now own a business in a nearby city about three hours away and are there, working, every single day. They will nominally ‘show up’ for family events, but will do holidays like Christmas in less than 12 hours. After my youngest sister’s wedding, they drove HOME that NIGHT without telling anyone, including my parents, who had just paid for their wedding six months before.
I have two young kids, 5 years old and 16 months. The older one was in the NICU when he was born. During this period I didn’t hear from my sister and my husband had to beg her to come see us. She has seen the younger one a total of two times in his life and the older one less than once a year, all at holidays. She declined the younger one’s first birthday party in July and said she would ‘make it up to us with a long weekend’ (this never happened). Then she declined the older one’s birthday in November without reaching out. When my husband asked her why she wasn’t coming, she asked why we weren’t coming to her city instead, and asked why she always has to ‘make the sacrifice.’
I feel so abandoned in my relationship with my sister, but I know that in order to repair it I will have to be the one to take action. I work a full-time job and have two small children. It deeply hurts me that she has no interest in my kids and doesn’t even pretend to. I understand that other people have lives and jobs and I want to be generous in my understanding of the situation, but I feel like she just does not give a shit. It would take her 5 seconds to ask for a picture and go ‘haha cute!’ (which is what I do for my COWORKERS!). I don’t even know what a good resolution to this situation looks like. I don’t want to be the bigger person but I guess I have to be? Do you have any thoughts?
This situation sounds so painful, especially considering you used to be close. It’s really difficult when someone you love starts to feel unknowable to you. I can think of a few times in my life when that’s happened and the memories are as vivid as a heartbreak. This is a sad part of life and loving people. But it’s not always a death knell to a relationship—I think when it comes to family especially, there’s a lot of room to just be out of step for a while (during a particular phase of life, say), and then find your way back to each other. The question for you I think is deciding how much you want to intervene in that process.
I can’t help but think you becoming a parent has a lot to do with this divide you’re feeling. Does that timing basically line up? If I had to guess at what’s going on in your sister’s head, I’d say that she doesn’t feel connected to your life as a parent nor the shift in your priorities that kids have introduced, and that she feels a bit resentful of how much she’s expected to be invested in your life now without a social script that demands you be as invested in hers. I put it this way to be as sympathetic as possible to your sister, because my sympathies lie more organically with you—my jaw dropped at some of the details (like her only having seen your younger baby twice in 16 months). If I were you, I’d feel totally baffled and hurt.
Regardless of the impetus, it sounds like your values have diverged. Of course something else could be going on that you’re not aware of (could be worth trying to find out), but from the sound of it, she’s oriented more toward her career or personal ambitions than her family right now. Maybe you have felt like that at various times in your life—I definitely have. It’s not an uncommon way of operating for a young American adult. When you’re in that place, I think it can be easy to think very little about what you owe other people, or whether they “need” you, because you don’t ask for much yourself. You’re self-starting, you take care of yourself, and in exchange for that effort, you generally remain self-focused. Personally, I don’t think this is the most fulfilling way to live long-term, but it’s certainly simpler (which isn’t to say easier).
If you happen to be living that way when you have a kid, parenthood yanks you out of that self-focus whether you like it or not. I’m not saying parents can’t be narcissistic, egocentric, self-indulgent, annoying! But unless they’re neglectful of their kids, they are, at the very least, giving up an enormous amount of autonomy every day for the sake of their loved ones. That’s just a fundamentally different way of being—one that some people (not all) truly cannot fathom before they’re in it themselves. I say this from experience, and not proudly. I cared so much when my sister had kids, cried at their births, photographed them incessantly, came around (what felt like) all the time, and still felt deeply ashamed once I had my own and realized just how little I’d done to extend myself for her—to help, to understand. I’ve apologized to her many times now. (I got my own apology from a friend the other day, two weeks after she’d given birth, and I’ll be honest, that shit felt good.)
Maybe I’m projecting a bit too much onto this situation with your sister by assuming it has so much to do with parenthood. But I want to raise the possibility that if it does, ignorance may be playing a larger role here than malevolence. When your love for your kids as a parent comes so easily, I think it can be hard not to view some people’s lack of interest as a lack of care for you as a person. This is a blindspot. Some people just don’t connect with kids. Whether your sister deserves it or not, you may find that you’re less resentful if you instead assume she has no ill will—that she’s just not in a place where she’s fully capable of comprehending the impacts of her actions. A place we all find ourselves in from time to time.
It can be such a relief to view people more generously. To that end, some things to consider going forward that I’ve tried to consider myself in these situations: Are you able to be as invested in her life as you’d like her to be in yours? Are you interested in her work? Do you try to make an effort to visit occasionally? Can you make holidays fun for you two specifically, as sisters, versus just for the kids? I wonder if some small gestures could go a long way with her (like the inverse of her asking you for a photo), make her feel more wanted (versus just “expected”), and eventually make her more open to hearing you out if you want to discuss directly how her absence makes you feel. Have you asked her, without judgment, why she hasn’t been around as much as she used to be? There may be an answer that softens you.
Even if this isn’t a rift you can solve with a heart-to-heart, I don’t think all hope is lost. Sometimes we go through incompatible phases with the people we love, and when a reconciliation doesn’t feel immediately possible, I do think there’s something to just riding them out as gracefully as we can.
2. On postpartum body image
“Can you talk about body image postpartum? I'm having a hard time and from the outside, you seem completely unaffected.”