My Body Is a Big Fat Temple

Download or read book My Body Is a Big Fat Temple written by Alena Dillon and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Body Is A Big Fat Temple is a memoir that charts the emotional journey of becoming a mother with humor and honesty, as well as investigating the natal shortcomings of our culture. It tracks Dillon, a writer in her thirties, as she debates having children, and then suffers a miscarriage, morning sickness, physical changes and impairments, anxiety, labor and delivery, breastfeeding, the "baby blues," the heartache of not loving her son as she thinks she should, parenting during a plague, and finally blossoming into her new identity as a mother. This isn't the airbrushed billboard for motherhood women are too-often presented to preserve the sacred image of Madonna and Baby. Dillon prepares her readers for what to really expect--dry heaves, belly hair, dark nipples, crotch lightning, sweat, pain, delirium, lots of tears, and ultimately joy--so the odyssey is given its fair due. The cost of creating life is astronomical. It requires resilience and strength (and lots of bathroom breaks). But more importantly, these truths need to be shared in order to normalize them. With more stories like these, women with reservations for motherhood, and those in the midst of its fever dream, won't feel so alone. Pregnancy is a human imperative, endured by so many, and yet there is very little narrative nonfiction on the topic--I looked--which only makes the experience more isolating. The stories of women matter. The stories of mothers matter. Let's make ourselves heard.