Why Yara Michels' fitting room selfie is vital
Open your Instagram and it's raining babies and bellies. Beautiful that new life that influencers share with you, but as so often online, a filter is regularly thrown over it here too. We see fresh mothers bobbing on a boat to Formentera two weeks later, slurping on an oyster and with a belly as flat as a countertop. And all as if it's nothing. Quotes like ‘Thanks to my breastfeeding, the pounds just melted away. I just melted’ or: ‘I'm actually slimmer after my deliveries than before and I do absolutely nothing about it’ fly around your ears. Now, it's not that I doubt the sincerity of these comments (some people just have such a body), but it's really not entirely realistic. For most women, it takes nine months to recover from pregnancy and to let that body bounce back a bit. It's also not unthinkable that some things change permanently. Stretch marks, a scar, a tear, that kind of thing.
And that's why I don't know where to start with praising Yara Michels in general and her fitting room selfie in particular. What do we see? A beautiful woman trying to squeeze herself into a pair of jeans that probably used to dance around her legs and where now there was a huge gap between button and buttonhole. I know this frustration.
I bought a gold jacket from By Malene Birger before my pregnancy, a favorite. After my delivery, I tried it on again. It was a bit tighter around the upper arms, but that was manageable. But even here, a bridge had to be built to bring button and buttonhole together. I was surprised because I was back to my old weight. Something must have happened to the jacket, my optimistic self thought, because it was impossible that my body had changed so much. The button was actually more at the level of my ribs and not at my belly, and my daughter hadn't been under my ribs, had she? The jacket went back into the closet to be pulled out again nine months later when I, for the first time without a child, went to New York for an interview. And then the unexpected happened: button and buttonhole found each other in a flowing motion. So it was true what they said: your body needs time to bounce back. For one person, that might take a week, for another a year, and for yet another, it might never happen completely. That's why what Yara did is brave. It offers a bit of comfort. And a sense of reality. Because nothing is what it seems. And especially not on Instagram.
Amen.
View this post on Instagram
Image: Instagram Yara Michels
