All I've seen is women claim it's a myth and that they couldn't lose all of their baby fat until they stopped breastfeeding.
But the saying had to come from somewhere, right?
Just here to see if any other bi women understand how I feel, as there isn't anyone in my life who can.
I'm one of those rare bi women who has an overwhelming preference for other women and who has mostly dated other women in adulthood. While I was single throughout my 20s and early 30s, I only went on dates with women, only looked for women on the apps, and only imagined spending my life with a woman. I actually thought I was a lesbian for several years and before that, asexual.
I unexpectedly fell in love with a man through friendship, and now we're engaged and having a baby.
The piece of this I want to share here is my fear of, my sadness about, and my struggle with the fact that I'm now going down a life path that will obscure who I really am and make it harder for me to be myself as a queer woman. I'm not talking about sex; I'm very monogamous and don't care much about sex in general. What sucks is that the world is going to look at me and my life and assume I'm heterosexual, with a typical hetero past and mindset. It sucks that I'll be surrounded by garden variety straight women with husbands and kids simply because I'll have a kid in school, women I won't be able to be myself around, and that it'll be even more difficult than it has been in the past to find and connect with the lesbian, bi, and single/childfree women I actually want to be friends with. I'm always going to feel this dissonance between the life I'm living externally and who I am internally. I even worry a little that the people who do know me will start to see me as an average woman living an average hetero lifestyle and forget that I don't think or feel or experience my sexuality like that.
My partner can never understand my experience with this; he's an average straight guy. I really want to make LBQ women friends locally, but I feel like I can't actively try without making him uncomfortable. And because I'm in a hetero relationship with a baby on the way, I feel like queer women living non-hetero lifestyles would just write me off as an outsider to their experience, even though I spent 20 years living, thinking, and feeling as an asexual or lesbian woman and only the past year in this hetero situation. And I don't even blame them.
It's just hard. It's lonely and sad and frustrating. I don't want to be socially trapped in straight world the rest of my life just because I love one man and have a kid with him. I don't want to be erased as the unique individual I am or have my past erased, like it doesn't matter or count.
Just here to see if any other bi women understand how I feel, as there isn't anyone in my life who can.
I'm one of those rare bi women who has an overwhelming preference for other women and who has mostly dated other women in adulthood. While I was single throughout my 20s and early 30s, I only went on dates with women, only looked for women on the apps, and only imagined spending my life with a woman. I actually thought I was a lesbian for several years and before that, asexual.
I unexpectedly fell in love with a man through friendship, and now we're engaged and having a baby.
The piece of this I want to share here is my fear of, my sadness about, and my struggle with the fact that I'm now going down a life path that will obscure who I really am and make it harder for me to be myself as a queer woman. I'm not talking about sex; I'm very monogamous and don't care much about sex in general. What sucks is that the world is going to look at me and my life and assume I'm heterosexual, with a typical hetero past and mindset. It sucks that I'll be surrounded by garden variety straight women with husbands and kids simply because I'll have a kid in school, women I won't be able to be myself around, and that it'll be even more difficult than it has been in the past to find and connect with the lesbian, bi, and single/childfree women I actually want to be friends with. I'm always going to feel this dissonance between the life I'm living externally and who I am internally. I even worry a little that the people who do know me will start to see me as an average woman living an average hetero lifestyle and forget that I don't think or feel or experience my sexuality like that.
My partner can never understand my experience with this; he's an average straight guy. I really want to make LBQ women friends locally, but I feel like I can't actively try without making him uncomfortable. And because I'm in a hetero relationship with a baby on the way, I feel like queer women living non-hetero lifestyles would just write me off as an outsider to their experience, even though I spent 20 years living, thinking, and feeling as an asexual or lesbian woman and only the past year in this hetero situation. And I don't even blame them.
It's just hard. It's lonely and sad and frustrating. I don't want to be socially trapped in straight world the rest of my life just because I love one man and have a kid with him. I don't want to be erased as the unique individual I am or have my past erased, like it doesn't matter or count.
I haven't even been in mom-related subs for long, but it's glaringly obvious that anytime a new mother is unhappy with her life after having a baby, everybody dismisses it as postpartum depression.
I'm not denying PPD exists, but the way it gets talked about is similar to how clinical depression gets talked about: this is just a chemical imbalance in your brain, you don't actually have any objective reason to be unhappy, take this pill and then you won't be depressed anymore even if your life stays exactly the same.
And that's clearly not the only explanation for a woman, especially a first time mom, feeling miserable right after having a baby. Yes, there's a hormone crash. That still doesn't negate the reality of a woman's life when she has a new baby, especially if it's her first.
I think it's insane to expect and promote the idea that a woman should feel nothing but bliss and love and total satisfaction with her new baby and not care at all that her life has been blown up, her body feels bad, and maybe she's in a shit romantic relationship or doesn't have any friends or is broke and doesn't know how she's going to pay for the baby. If your life circumstances are terrible, you should be unhappy. That is a logical response. If you've just lost a life you loved and feel like hell, that's not depression; that's grief. It's ridiculous to blame it all on hormones and a screwed up brain.
Why can't we acknowledge that having a baby is not some one-dimensional emotional trip to The Greatest Love Ever and that some women do regret it, some women did have pre baby lives they loved and have now lost and no amount of love for the baby can compensate for that, some women are in truly awful life circumstances when they have a baby and the baby only makes it worse? Why is the response always: this woman needs to be medicated and convinced by a therapist that nothing is wrong with her life and motherhood is the greatest thing that ever happened to her?
(The answer, of course, is patriarchy.)
I had my first BPPV experience last year, and it took 8 weeks of PT to finally resolve. Right horizontal canal. It's probably excessive to call it a traumatic experience, but I HATE vertigo more than any other sensation, including pain. It's deeply disturbing to me.
After fixing it, I slowly started to go back to the things I had been avoiding, with plenty of anxiety about it.
I had a relapse 3 months later, which I mostly resolved myself with immediate application of the maneuver. I had some residual symptoms for a few days, went back to PT to check I was clear and was.
Since then, I've been mostly okay, but had a lot of dizziness due to stress and extreme neck muscle tension, especially for the first couple months after. That has improved, and I'm currently in balance PT. I had a possible partial relapse a couple months ago that was never a full blown episode like before and treated that with my therapist.
But I'm still not sleeping on my right side. I'm still careful about rolling over in bed. I still get anxious about taking falls and doing rolls in martial arts. I've been doing 2-3 minutes of exposure therapy for lying on my right side daily for weeks at a time, and my anxiety is low when I do it but still present.
Has anyone got past this sort of thing after curing BPPV? How and how long did it take you?
I want to hear from women who feel like they're still the same people inside as they were before kids, who see motherhood as one life choice they made among many and not their sole source of purpose, meaning, identity, etc. Women who maybe didn't want kids before changing their mind or who did want them but alongside other goals and desires that were just as significant.
How hard was becoming a mother for the first time?
How did you hold onto the other parts of your life that matter to you and how difficult was it to pull off?
Did you go through depression postpartum, especially in the first year?
What's your advice for managing unhappiness with life and even regret postpartum, besides therapy?
I've seen a lot of women say they lost all their muscle mass after birth, but obviously, many of these women don't lift and had low mass prior to pregnancy.
I plan on lifting at my usual frequency and weight up until birth or as close to it as I can get. If I do that, it would be weird to end up losing a lot of muscle anyway.
I'm also curious about strength loss. If you lifted throughout pregnancy, did you lose strength anyway?
Did you buy a bigger size? Get permission to train in workout clothes? Something else?
I'm hoping you all can sympathize, whether you have kids or don't, have sons or don't. There's hardly anywhere I can talk about this, which I'm sure doesn't shock you given the world and the consciousness most women have.
I'm pregnant with my first baby and was told a couple weeks ago it's most likely a boy. Too early to be sure but odds are good, I guess.
So, now, I have to come to terms with the reality of what I'm doing, how my son is most likely to turn out, and what that makes me responsible for in the world. It's hard to sit with. The extent of my powerlessness as a mother over what this man will be like. All the possibilities of him harming women and girls, even in childhood. The way he's going to see me as a woman. What I'll have to be around and live with in my home, as far as his male friends and shit like porn, video games, podcasts, etc. Everywhere I turn, I'm reminded of how misogynistic males are, at every age. And now I'm adding to that. And there is very little I can do to prevent it.
I made the mistake of posting about my feelings in a pregnancy sub, where women across the political and philosophical spectrum congregate, and of course got flamed by a bunch of triggered boy moms who act like my realistic expectations are worse than male behavior toward women and girls. It just reminded me that I'll never be able to talk to other mothers in real life about my experience raising a boy and how the boy moms around my son are likely to be enablers of their own sons' sexism and misogyny, not allies in trying to minimize how much our sons embrace it.
I know there isn't any real advice or solutions you can give me. This situation is what it is. Men are what they are. I just wanted to vent to women who can understand. Loving a son while also holding a realistic awareness of what he is, is going to be incredibly difficult. And I am afraid that the worst will happen, and I'll have to spend the rest of my life feeling guilty for making another woman's suffering possible.
I'm a copywriter with 5+ years of in-house experience, 7+ years of marketing experience total. I was laid off in October 2023 and didn't start to seriously look until January 2024, pretty much. I haven't gotten an offer yet.
Most of the jobs I've applied to have been fully remote. I want a fully remote job, they pay far better than local jobs usually, and despite living in a big city, there aren't many copywriting jobs that pop up around here. That said, I have applied and interviewed for some local jobs too during this time.
During my job search, I have:
• rewritten my resume several times, both by myself and with AI help
• tried different resume formats
• written cover letters for highly attractive jobs
• tailored my resume to each individual attractive job for at least the first year, until I got tired of the work and tried the one size fits most approach
• applied to freelance gigs, part time and full time
• re-worked my linkedin
• created an online portfolio website
I am in a desperate situation now, life wise. I'm pregnant and really need a job ASAP. Yes, I know this makes me less attractive as a candidate for full time roles, but I can't mentally handle giving up and putting off the job search until after the baby comes. By then, I will have been unemployed for 3 years. There's no way that'll make it easier for me than it is now. I can't bring myself to give up and accept what that would mean for my life.
I guess I want to know if this is truly just bad luck, a bad resume, bad interviewing specific to me, or if part of the problem really is the job market for copywriters.
And what should I do? This is the only work I have any professional experience in from within the last decade. I don't really want to do anything else, and even if I tried, I'd be taking a huge pay cut as an entry level anything. A pay cut I simply can't afford now and over the next several years.
I haven't asked my gym if they have a rule against this yet, but if they don't, then I think I'll have to try it during the first couple years if I have any hope of working out my usual 4-5x a week. They don't take kids under 2 years old at their childcare center.
Of course, I wouldn't bring a fussy baby with me and ruin everyone else's workout. But if the kid gets to a point in year 1 where he or she can be quiet and chill for 60-90 minutes while attached to me, I'd like to try lifting while wearing.
Anyone do this?