Mama Muse Rachelle | on body love during pregnancy and beyond

Rachelle & I met when I joined a mom group called Mumnet here in Toronto, a few years back. I was smitten with her immediately. A fast friendship emerged and now three years later we are still in each others lives and it just makes my heart so happy.

She is a beautiful individual - inside and out. She’s inspiring, she’s heartfelt, she’s a blast to be around with the most infectious laugh, plus she sure has one cute little mister, Elliott, that my little Oscar has had some great hangs with (and I cant wait for more!).

Rachelle is currently pregnant with her second babe, and around 23 weeks in her journey, one afternoon we documented her journey. Her relationship with her body, how she teaches people to understand their own body and the way she talks about the body is something I found so absolutely beautiful and important to hear and share. And so, here, today we are here to feature this wise woman and her experience with her body before, during, after and again through a second pregnancy.

Everyone’s story is their own and I think each is so powerfully important.

Words by Rachelle | Photos by yours truly, Scarlet

“Movement is how I communicate with the world, and therefore my body is the tool I use to present myself to others. I am a professional performer and fitness instructor. I grew up dancing my entire life. But, before I go into detail about my journey, I do have to acknowledge the immense amount of body privilege that I have had and do have. Genetically, I am a small woman. My parents are short and light in weight- they have “desired bodies” by societal standards (although I think that is starting to change, finally!) Therefore, I too have a body that is often seen as “desired”, even when my weight (which is a measurement, I have learned, is best for me to personally avoid) fluctuates. In my adult life, I have been 98 lbs and I have been over 150 lbs (I am 5'2”). I am currently pregnant and have no idea where I am on the scale and that is fine by me. The numbers are triggering for me and so I choose to no longer look at them. I base my health on how I feel, on how my body moves and on what it is telling me. This perspective did not come easily to me and it has taken many years and many experiences to be able to see things in this way.

I spent a lot of my youth and into my early twenties not liking myself. I was disrespectful to a body that I overworked all of the time. I did not nourish it properly, I did not value it and I talked negatively about myself and to myself constantly. The numbers on the scale started taking over my life when I was thirteen years old. I valued skinniness. It was my way of “fitting in” or having something that other girls coveted. I felt very alone as a brown skinned girl growing up. I was only amongst a handful of people of colour in the city I grew up in, at the time. I had an athletic and skinny body, which was the only thing that made me feel as though I could belong.

As I grew up, I faced a lot of hardships as a performer. I suffered from many different injuries and did not know how to take care of myself. I leaned into fitness as a way to strengthen my body and in doing so, I started to slowly look at my body differently. By the time I was almost thirty, I began to challenge my body with fitness competitions and in doing so, started to educate myself about nutrition. Mind you, I was on an extreme diet but I learned how to personally apply the connection between building muscle and food intake. Food was no longer my enemy and so after my competition journey, I was able to try things without being afraid. I was also in a secure relationship, and soon married a person who loved me unconditionally. As a result, I no longer needed the false narrative that in order to be loved I had to look a certain way.

Then I became pregnant with our first child, and through this process, I evolved and grew tremendously and did not need the validation from others to feel love for myself and my body. Now, I do want to warn you that this might be triggering for people struggling with fertility. I often do not share my story because I know it is hard to relate to. But I feel compelled to include this information because it is necessary to why I had the experience I had. Throughout my entire twenties leading up to this time, I was on different pharmaceutical cocktails for a mental health illness. My pregnancy was not planned, and the medications I was on at the time were both deemed safe. However, the medical experts were not certain if the dosages I was on (and had been on for several years) had the potential to harm the baby. This was a horrifying discovery for myself and my husband. I had an amazing medical team and was deemed high risk because we did not know what was going to happen. So instead of just following through and staying on the medication, I made the decision to seek out support and very slowly and carefully wean myself off during my pregnancy. I had to journal every day about my mood and my body. I sought out alternatives to help support my mental health. I already knew that movement helped me tremendously and I continued to teach 15- 20 fitness classes a week. I found hypnobirthing and practiced mindfulness. I found an amazing doula who could offer me the birth support I needed. I was in a program at Mount Sinai that would allow me to stay at the hospital until I felt mentally prepared to leave. As I went in for each check-up and my OB told me everything was looking good with the baby, I started to feel more and more proud of my body for the work it was doing. It was doing a tremendous job adapting to a lot of change in a short period of time. I read and researched and worked very hard preparing for the birth and labour. My husband did a lot of work too, researching how he could support me and also about newborn health and care. Now, I clearly was overworking my body in terms of my level of activity, and now as a pre/postnatal fitness specialist, I can look back and see the several cues my body gave me to indicate that I needed to slow down but I also look back in awe.

My son, Elliott, was born early at 36 weeks. He was healthy and beautiful. I had the most empowering, life changing, lovely birthing experience I could have ever imagined. I had the support that every birthing mama needs but no one seems to get. I was extremely fortunate.

I was also able to breastfeed right away, which I know is something many women struggle with. (Again, I know I'm not the most relatable person but I am hoping that the lessons I learned may be applicable to others regardless of their differing choices or circumstances.) I soon became an attachment parent. My husband did too. With very little notice and no real plan for a mat leave, I went back to work around four months postpartum. I exclusively breastfed up until almost seven months and did not complete my breastfeeding journey until Elliott was 2.5 years old. During this time, my body was under a lot of stress; I was working it like an athlete, I was not sleeping properly, all while nourishing a child. My breastfeeding body held onto weight; it was a bigger body, it was a hormonal body, which resulted in a lot of aches and pains. I struggled again, I got back on the scale and was devastated. I tried to lose weight and sought out help... only to realize that my body needed to stay where it was at based on the circumstances I was in. So, I made the conscious effort to accept it for what it was - to love it for what it was and for the amazing work it was doing for me.

I moved on, I modified my exercise regime and I started to change my career and focus on developing a holistic approach to instructing pre/postnatal fitness classes. I realized that this idea of “bouncing back,” which is so dominant in our culture, makes absolutely no sense to me. We cannot go backwards. Becoming a mother is a true evolution of self. A body that birthed a babe is not the same as a body that didn't - not hormonally, not physically, not mentally and not spiritually. How on earth can we expect to go backward? How about giving ourselves permission to accept our experiences and how they shape us and work hard to heal and move forward? (Easier said than done, I know.) How about accepting that postpartum healing takes time (for some weeks, for some years) and we should honour ourselves with patience and grace? How about accepting that we can always build strength in whatever form our postpartum bodies take? How about celebrating postpartum bodies for the amazing accomplishments that they achieved in growing and bringing another being into the world?

We are all different and have varying experiences that literally shape our bodies. We cannot compare ourselves to one another, we cannot compare our current selves to our past selves. When I teach, I see beauty in every single body that steps before me because I know it took each person a hell of a lot of work, energy and strength to show up for themselves. I am so glad that I am finally able to see that same beauty in myself.

As, I take more time to listen to my now pregnant body, as I take better care of it, I come to see myself as stronger than ever before. These beautiful photographs that Scarlet has captured illustrate that I can now, not only accept the power I possess, but own it. I want all birthing people - all those who are mothers - to know that they are amazing, rock-star, warrior humans with tremendous, limitless beauty and power. “ - Rachelle Ganesh Bain