Sometimes, when pregnancy comes to its natural end women are left with a permanent reminder of their nine months spent carrying their little passenger (and I don’t mean the baby)… Of course, it is obvious that the body has to go through many changes in order to accommodate the growing child; these changes can put the body under a considerable amount of stress and it is not usually able to snap back to its pre-pregnancy glory in the blink of an eye.
In today’s society, we are ever-so-slightly obsessed with just how quickly we can erase the marks that pregnancy leaves behind. Celebrities, actresses and pop-stars are all judged post-labour on how quickly they can get their waif-like frames back, and on how well they have managed to keep the stretch marks at bay.
While the rest of us mere mortals don’t usually have a load of paps camping outside our front doors waiting to find out how well (or not) our physical recuperation is going, we can usually do that job for them every time we look in a mirror. Coverage in women’s magazines sets the standard that we measure ourselves by, and many of us will feel disappointment and frustration when we don’t live up to our own expectations.
