I Embrace Being Unsexy (Forever)

On being a nice mid.

I was never a bombshell to begin with. I was not a hot girl.

Why did people date me? Maybe because I was quirky and funny or threw good parties or (at some point) gave off an aura of sexual freedom. Who knows?

But let’s be honest, none of that matters anymore. After I got married, and especially after I became a mother, I started having to redefine my relationship with my physical self.

Before marriage, I had moments where I wondered deeply about the impact monogamy would have on my ego. Fleeting thoughts of, “Is this it? Will I only ever be attractive to one person for the rest of my life? And will that person even find me attractive in five years and/or after I gain five kilos?”

And yes, to my deep embarrassment, I confess that I embarked on an intense and deeply miserable pre-wedding diet in an effort to look good in the pictures that I paid to have taken of me. To my credit, I abandoned it two weeks in because I was SO HUNGRY and so miserable and seriously questioning if our relationship would even survive my pre-wedding diet because the sight of my lovely now-husband eating a slice of bread made me apoplectic with rage. So I ate a croissant, deleted MyFitnessPal, embraced my chunky upper arms, and called an end to 18 years of dieting.

But then I got pregnant, and and I had a baby. And my friends, I was not a cute, glowing, “bump-only” pregnant lady. I broke out into cystic acne, like, ALL OVER my body, my back and my face and even my arms. Like Kate Middleton, I developed hyperemesis gravidarium, but unlike Kate Middleton, instead of making me dangerously thin, it made my face puffy and yellow-green. I also got gestational hypertension, which made my wrists, hands, feet, and ankles puff up like marshmallows - I looked like an elephant. My breasts did NOT miraculously turn beautifully and bountifully full, instead, my entire ribcage expanded, together with the green tint, gave me a pleasing resemblance to The Incredible Hulk.

The moment you give birth, the world starts telling you it’s time to start “working on yourself”—like pregnancy and motherhood haven’t already taken everything you’ve got. And due to intense and debilitating postpartum depression, I did indeed lose all 20kg I gained during pregnancy (and then some) within four weeks of giving birth. I was congratulated heartily for “bouncing back” so “effortlessly.” My OBGYN (famed for doing some of the best obstetric needlework in Singapore) complimented me (and himself) six weeks later, proclaiming that my pelvic floor and my first-degree tear had healed beautifully, and in his professional opinion, he couldn’t even tell from my pelvic floor ultrasound that I had even been pregnant, much less given birth vaginally. He installed an IUD (without anaesthesia because you know, I had given birth so surely I could handle a bit more pain), said coyly that I could resume “relations” immediately, and referred me to a psychiatrist for severe symptoms of PPD.

And yet, even my tremendously unhealthy weight loss wasn’t enough. People kept asking. What are you doing to keep the spark alive? What are you doing to maintain intimacy? Are you setting up mini-dates in the living room while the baby is napping? Are you patting his bum suggestively when you pass him in the kitchen to go wash the dishes, as your breast pump is whining hee-haw, hee-haw? My mother had this weird habit of saying to me, even before I got pregnant, “You know, you have to make a man feel like a man, otherwise another woman will do it for you.”

I didn’t say this then, but I want to be clear about where I stand now - the expectation that it’s on the WOMAN to shed baby weight, slip into flattering lingerie that skims the post-baby pooch (or ideally do enough Pilates to not have a pooch at all), plan romantic date nights, and maintain her “feminine mystique” after pushing a literal human being out of her vagina (or having a human being cut out of her body) for fear her husband will cheat is so fucking sick and misogynistic.

Okay, thanks.

Let’s get one thing straight: if my husband decides to leave me, it won’t be because I didn’t work hard enough to stay sexy or mysterious or new to him. It won’t be because I asked him to help change my adult diapers in bed because I was too damn tired and in pain from my perineal tear to get up. It won’t be because I somehow failed in my role as wife or mother.

It’s not my job to constantly perform attractiveness to anyone, not even my husband. If society tells me otherwise, then society is wrong.

Let’s be super clear, like, disgustingly so on this. I may not have incontinence or suffer from vaginal dryness or painful intercourse, but my body is irrevocably changed. I’ve been through pregnancy, (a relatively easy, 5-days-long, but only-8-hours-active) labor, postpartum recovery, breastfeeding, and sleepless nights, and I have the scars, stretch marks, wrinkles, white hairs, and persistent aches to prove it. I have sporadic attacks of sciatica, hemorrhoids, and pelvic girdle pain if I wear skinny jeans or Brazilian bikini underwear with the buttcrack seam or cross my legs for too long

The thought of slipping into Spanx to flatten out my post-baby pooch feels like contemplating medieval punishment. High heels? I still have stretch marks on my ankles, for crying out loud! When I look at old photos of my pre-baby self, I feel a strange mix of nostalgia and disbelief—like, “Who the fuck is that girl?” Sure, she was cute, but she also doesn’t really exist in reality any more.

But the real wake-up call wasn’t just losing my pre-baby body; it was realising that I no longer care about the expectation that I should “keep things tight” (GAG) for my husband so that my son grows up with a father. It infuriates me. Why should it be on me? Note: This is not to say I give up on the idea of pleasure, sexual or otherwise - which I enjoy and encourage.

And yes, despite my horrific lack of effort, my husband still looks at me with love. He still claims to find me attractive. And I appreciate that he is a very nice man, after all, I did marry him, and I did propose to have him impregnate me. But that doesn’t make him a saint, that makes him a decent fucking human being that respects and loves a person that risked their life to provide him (and myself) with offspring. Finding the person you got pregnant still attractive and not repulsive after witnessing them giving birth is kind of…normal?

I’m not here to bounce back. I’m here to raise our child, take care of myself, and live a full, embodied life.

After 30-odd years of having to give a shit about being literally everything everyone wants me to be, I’m exhausted. Not in a “I just need a nap” kind of way, but in a “my soul is tired” kind of way. I know who I am. I know what I look like. But it doesn’t determine whether or not I am worthy of love, fulfillment, or eroticism.