My secret? Breastfeed, don't sleep and don't eat

Surfing the web the other day, getting in my celeb gossip (yes *sigh* I do dig celeb gossip. Always have. It's my dirty little secret that my husband hates, but tolerates because it's part of me), via Her Bad Mother, I stumbled upon a little thing about Victoria Secret supermodel EvaHerzigova and her recent birth:

"Nature has a way of taking care of things. If you have a certain figure you'll go back to it," the Czech model said at theAmfAR fundraiser in Rome. "Breast-feed and don't worry about it."

While HBM (who wrote the item) called bullshit on what Herzigova said, I started mulling over how every woman's body morphs into something completely different after having a baby. And the funny thing is, I don't think you really know what you're going to get until you get there.

Take me for instance -- I gained only 15 pounds while pregnant and at my six-week checkup after giving birth, I lost 40. According to people now, I still look like I'm losing weight. I call it the Miranda Hobbes baby diet (after the Sex and the City episode in which Miranda, after giving birth fits into her skinny jeans and looks fabulous in them) -- you have a baby, stop eating and sleeping, begin running around and catering to the needs of a very small, very demanding organism and PRESTO! The weight melts off.

HOWEVER -- I do not have the tight body that supposedly comes with losing said weight. I still have a pouch of skin from where BD resided in me. My boobs are drooping so low, the kid might be able to grab onto them to learn how to walk. There's stretch marks all over the damn place. This is not a supermodel body. This is a body that's been through a battle.

But I know some women who bounced back and look the same -- my sister doesn't look like she's changed at all. I know some women who have gained weight. My point is that it's hard to say how things work out until you go through this. Maybe Eva's (and her colleague Heidi Klum) got the miracle body that snaps back after said baby. Maybe they've got particularly active children that like to exercise at six weeks old. Maybe they have trainers and a team of plastic surgeons. I have no clue. Frankly, I really don't care. If they got lucky, great.

But it seems weird to me that some moms talk about -- nay, obsess -- over how they looked pre- and post-pregnancy. The thing is that motherhood changes you entirely -- physically, mentally, spiritually and psychologically (not to mention, ecumenically and grammatically /Capt. Sparrow). I won't say something new-agey like a butterfly/cocoon because that's bullshit. You don't know. Some days you're a better person. Some days you're not. But it does change you in ways you don't expect, and sometimes you end up missing the person you were before the baby came into your life.

I can't help but wonder (another SATC nod) if the obsessing over the pre- and post-pregnancy look is more about missing what once was. Not just the body, but life before baby.