In a world of perfection here’s to the mums with stretch marks and mum tums

No filters here.

I saw a post on Instagram that made me rethink how I viewed my post baby body. It's been almost three years since I gave birth to my youngest and let me just say the mum tum is not going anywhere. Doesn't matter how many stomach crunches or sit ups I do. Doesn't matter if I cut down on calories. It just doesn't matter, the mum tum is here to stay and for the longest time I've struggled with that knowledge. I've beat myself up for the last couple of years about my over hanging stomach thinking that I was the only one feeling this way but yesterday I realised I wasn't alone. There's a lot of mums in my social media feeds that I've gotten themselves fully back into shape after having their children and I've felt like a bit of a failure for not being able to do the same. I thought my stomach looked awful and don't even get me started on the stretch marks. Then one of the girls I went to school with posted a photo of her progress with her personal trainer and she let it all hang out, literally. In the photos she allowed her mum tum to hang over her leggings and posted about how she didn't care because two children came out of her body and saggy tummy or not, it was worth it. Seeing her post made me think about how I viewed my own body and that it was time we all stopped hiding our mum tums and imperfections. I've had people make remarks like 'shouldn't you wear a one piece bathing suit so that your stomach isn't exposed?' or 'should you be really be wearing something so form fitting?'  and you know what I'm done with it. Please stop putting your notions of perfection onto me. I have no room for it in my life. So much of modern life is focused on filters and photoshop and looking perfect that we've forgotten what real bodies look like and we need to back up. We need to start posting photos of our mum tums, of our stretch marks, of what our bodies actually look like. We need to start supporting mums and their real bodies and normalising imperfect bodies once again.