Her Husband’s Response to Her Body After Baby Is What Love Is About

If you’re one of the many, many moms not quite fully embracing your post-baby figure, take a moment to consider what’s making you feel self-conscious. Is it the fact that your own body looks as unfamiliar as a stranger’s? Or that you feel like more like an overworked milk machine than a woman? For blogger Laura Mazza, she felt all those emotions, and assumed her husband saw her in the same way she viewed herself.

“‘This isn’t the body you fell in love with,’ I said to him,” she writes in a recent Facebook post. “The body he fell in love with was toned, it had muscles, there were no stretch marks on my belly, none on my boobs, no gut from muscle separation…His body stayed the same, but mine changed in every way. It isn’t fair.”

But her husband’s response helped the mom of two reevaluate how she viewed herself.

“He said, ‘you’re right. It isn’t the body I fell in love with. Instead it’s a body that grew our children, it fed our children, it comforted our children, it made life. Your body is the one I fall in love with every day. I didn’t know what love was until I saw this body and found out all it could do, so thank you."

Based on the nearly 5,000 comments below the Facebook post, this is the type of message more moms need to hear from their partners.

“I hope you’ll always love me in any way,” one woman comments, tagging her partner. Comment after comment women are tagging their own husbands and partners.

This isn’t the first time Mazza has owned up to feeling insecure about her body after baby. In a candid post last year, Mazza, who writes the blog Mum on the Run, proclaimed that “love makes you fat.”

“I felt like people were forcing me to love my body,” Mazza wrote in the post, which featured photos of her body both before and after baby. “‘You’ve only got one,’ [they’d say.] Well, I don’t care. I want to be skinny.”

Slowly but surely, Mazza came to a realization.

“You know what? I have achieved more with this body than I have with my old body,” she said. “I’ve eaten more good foods. I’ve lived more, I’ve given more, I’ve enjoyed more. I’ve made life. This body, THIS body should be celebrated and admired. I still want to look like the first photo, no doubt. I miss that body, it makes me sad. But I want to get there in a healthy way, mentally and physically. I want to be proud and at peace with this body. And I want to like what I’ve got now.”

Watch: Celebs Body After Baby