The Sacred Mother-Belly

And the dark spirituality behind the cultural disdain for our middles

Venus and Cupid by Luca Cambiaso (1527–1585)

A quick note here at the top to let you know that this post is about mother’s bodies, but it is also about women’s bodies generally. However, if you are struggling to conceive, have suffered a miscarriage, or long to be a mother and have not yet been given a child, some of these thoughts may be painful to read. If the emptiness of your womb is a particular challenge for you today, consider skipping this one. Your body is infinitely valuable and good, and God is capable of healing even the deepest wounds. Grace and peace to you, sister.

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I’ve made a habit of getting off social media during Advent and into January. It’s a habit I’ve grown to love and appreciate, and one that I’m thinking may become my norm rather than a two-month hiatus. Much of this is because of what happened this January when I got back online, which was that I had to bear witness to The Internet in January™️, which is the worst, especially if you are a woman with a body.

Within 3 clicks, I was back under the water of what the algorithm thinks I need, its proposed solution to why my life is hard, which is apparently that my body is too big, and thus needs to professional help mother-specific diet and workout apps. According to the waterfall of advertisements for things I “need” (workout plans, diet plans, supplements, unlimited before-and-after photos), the answer to all my problems is a smaller body.

Before we get too far into this, I want to be clear: this is not a post about self-esteem or body-image. Not really. It’s about something deeper than that: the root, or at least a root beneath the surface or our generally low self-esteem and body-image as mothers in the secular west.

I’ve spent years—decades, actually—untangling shame from my own body image. In fact, I talked about it with my counselor this week. I’m desperate to get to the root of why I think the way I look is such a big problem, and why I think anyone actually cares how I look in the fist place. One of the primary sites of body shame for me is my middle, my belly, my “core”. Accepting this place as “good enough to forget about” (the goal of most of my body-image therapy work) has only gotten harder since having children. I do not have to explain this to you. If you are a woman, you understand how the irreversible changes brought on by carrying and birthing a child can fundamentally change a woman’s view of self.

But I’ve come to the end of the self-esteem conversation. The affirmations about my inherent value and beauty just do not get deep enough. Thoughts about my body, even new and true and holy thoughts about my body, aren’t enough to solve the root problem. And I think it’s because ground zero of mother’s shame about their bodies isn’t that we’re thinking about them wrongly, it’s that they’re under spiritual attack by the enemy of God. The issue at hand isn’t primarily intellectual, it is primarily spiritual.

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This realization came in a very rare moment of clarity my counselor’s office. “How very much like the enemy of God,” I said “to sow such disdain in an entire culture for the very place that all human life begins.” I need to elaborate on just how rare a thought of such generosity is for me: it’s almost never. Or, it is never, with the exception of this singular shining moment.

But it was true enough, and it’s been stuck in my mind since. Though the narrative around women’s bodies—particularly mothers’ bodies—has come a long way, even in my few decades as a bonafide grownup, we are still so far from the kind of body-awareness we were designed by God to enjoy.

For example, we’ve likely all heard, seen, or read of a woman’s frustration with the illegitimacy of “bouncing back” after a child. Images of pregnant and postpartum women are not hidden as they’ve been throughout history. It isn’t uncommon for women to share, see, and celebrate one another’s bodies as they grow and expand and do the good work of labor. All of this is great, it is progress. But it is not a cure. Calling ourselves “beautiful” instead of “ugly” is good, but that kind of mental change deals mainly with the symptoms of the problem and does little to actually solve it.

This is because these ideas and practices suppose that the problem is primarily the narrative around women’s bodies in the west: we’ve been sold a version of the Ideal Female Figure along with infinite programs and products to help us secure that image for ourselves. If the problem is the image and our thinking around the image, the solution must be a new narrative and a new image. We need the body positivity movement! We need plus size models! Not bad things, hear me! But all this representation and visibility hasn’t cured our shame. And it’s because those are symptoms of the deeper illness at hand.

Here’s a silly illustration. Imagine you drive beat-up car to and from work on a road that’s full of potholes and is in total disrepair. Driving on this road only further damages your already run-down little car. To solve the problem, you get a new car. It makes the drive smoother for a while, but over time, the road will beat up that nice, new car, too. This is because merely exchanging models will not fix the root of the problem, which is that the road is a mess and needs torn out and rebuilt.

While our thinking and our images are problematic, and changing them may help in the short term, the actual problem stems from something bigger, deeper, and darker. The root of our problem isn’t that women have low self-esteem. It’s that women’s bodies, particularly our bellies, are sites of significant spiritual attack. Our hatred for our bellies doesn’t come only from the media, though the media has perpetuated and monetized our hatred of our bellies. The true genesis of our mother-belly shame is the enemy of God.

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Let’s hop back to third grade and draw ourselves a tidy little compare and contrast chart. On the right side, we have the nature of the enemy of God (and, by extension, the enemy of God’s creative order). On the left, we have its opposite: the nature of God and his intent and design of human life.

The essence of the nature of God is Life. Human life is his idea, his handiwork that he calls the most blessed of all creation. God creates man in his image, which means that we carry his likeness. One of the ways women are uniquely blessed in image-bearing is in our capacity to foster new life within ourselves before birthing it into the world.

It is by God’s good design and desire that this happens in a woman’s womb. I cannot claim to know why God put the uterus where he did, but I know it was on purpose, and I know he called it good and continues to say so. In this way, a woman’s womb is one of the most explicitly sacred sites of the human body. It is the location of God’s continued blessing of expanding his Kingdom of image-bearers on the earth. The significance of a woman’s middle cannot be overstated.

How, then, could we imagine the enemy of God, who hates all that God loves and calls good, would leave this part of us alone. How could we think it could ever be a spiritually neutral site?

The enemy of God will use anything to draw our attention and affection away from God. His primary methodology is by warping our view of what is inherently good, true, and beautiful. He doesn’t usually insert boldly antithetical ideas into our cultural psyche. He twists the truth just a little bit, just a few degrees off center, and allows it to continue to grow sideways until, finally, we confuse the lie for the truth.

Here’s how I see that playing out in self-image in women, in general, and mothers, specifically.

Since I’ve been on this whole mother-belly kick, I’ve taken stock of the language used to describe what a mother’s belly is supposed to look like, what we’re supposed to be striving for, the ideal. Here are a few of the words I’ve seen over and over again:

• Sculpt

• Chisel

• Hard

• Flat

• Defined

• Melt

• Trim

Do you notice a theme here? These are all actions humans take against natural, inanimate resources—the earth which we were created to “subdue”. These are actions taken by sculptors to a block of marble, carpenters to a jagged board, a gardener to an unruly vine.

It seems to me that the truth that the enemy has twisted, the one that has turned into such an invasive, throbbing lie is in regards to what makes a body good. The truth is that God created our bodies as beautiful in who they represented (himself) and their goodness was found in their ability to participate in the ongoing expansion of God’s kingdom.

The enemy got hold of that beauty piece and conflated it with a body’s goodness. He said: did God really say your body is beautiful “because it displays God”? Or did he say it is good because it is beautiful? Beauty is subjective, let’s come up with our own definition! How about…adherence to a predetermined cultural standard? And the body’s goodness can be measured by how close or far away it is to that standard?

The enemy turned our bodies, good and beautiful in their likeness to God, into objects of aesthetic beauty as defined by every-changing, mainly unattainable, earthly standards. The enemy of God loves that we’ve dehumanized our bodies, loves that we use inanimate language to describe how we will subdue our bodies, to turn them from unruly flesh into orderly works of stone.

It’s from this root of thinking that we get the idea that a once a woman gives birth, it is best that the physical proof of her motherhood be erased as quickly as possible. It’s why we see so many advertisements for postpartum fitness programs with the “before” picture as a woman’s body directly after giving birth, as if this is the lowest she’ll ever get. It’s why the “after” photos show absolutely no trace that a woman ever held life in her womb. It’s why a mother’s body is praised only when you cannot tell by looking at her that she is a mother.

This is the root problem: the enemy of God hates life. He hates everything involved in the process of more of God’s image bearers being born into the world. He will do anything and everything in his power to convince us to hate it to, including sowing disdain for the physical manifestation of more life as displayed in a mother’s belly during and after child birth.

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Now, let me. clarify: I am not saying that it is more holy to work hard to heal and strengthen our bodies after giving birth. Postpartum wellness and exercise is not inherently an agreement with the enemy of God. After all, God gave us bodies to care for and steward with consistency and intention. The issue is not whether we exercise or watch our food in pursuit of health. The issues are why we’re doing it. If we’re doing it to ensure that our bodies are continually capable of participating in the expansion of God’s kingdom, be that through child bearing or ministry or any other means of gospel-love, great! Carry on!

But if we are engaging these thoughts and behaviors to sculpt our bodies into aesthetic objects of earthly beauty, we do well to take pause. Let’s not forget what God promises life with him will include: taking our hearts of stone and replacing them with hearts of flesh: soft, beating, alive things that can stretch and grow and produce more of themselves.

I fear that by confusing the language and activity with caring for and stewarding our image-bearing bodies for subduing our bodies, we end up dehumanizing ourselves. The temptation to agree with the enemy is subtle, but the fact remains that agreement (even quiet, gradual agreement) with him is a choice away from the one who created our bellies and called them good and blessed them with his ability to bear new life.

It brings to mind Psalm 115:4-8, which says

Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
eyes, but do not see.
They have ears, but do not hear;
noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel;
feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat.
Those who make them become like them;
so do all who trust in them.

When we set up our altars with these fitness influencers’ photos glowing with the candles we piously keep lit with our self-loathing, we do become like them, but not merely in our physical appearance. As we stare at the before-and-afters and follow the protocols of these two-dimensional images on our screens, we are at risk of losing something much more valuable than fat and inches. We are at risk of losing what makes us ourselves, which is our bearing of God’s image. We’re at risk of losing our reverence for God’s specific blessing upon our bodies, particularly our bellies, and their inextricable participation in God’s kingdom expanding on the earth.

(This is to say nothing against the influencers: they may be wonderful! But the image of a person, no matter their character, is not what we were meant to become, not what God had in mind when he designed our flourishing. A thriving, healthy, vibrant version of ourselves is what he had in mind.)

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You’ll have to forgive me for working out these still-developing thoughts here in real time, and also for the fact that I don’t have a great way to tie this up. I don’t have reflection questions or practical applications aside from praying earnestly that God would “transform your mind” in this area.

I can share with you my sincere hope, for myself and for you. It’s that we’d be freed from the root problem of The Internet in January™️, which is the spiritual attack on life and its sacred container (our bodies). It’s that we’d eat and move in the firm belief that our bodies are good and beautiful because they are God’s. That we’d celebrate what our bodies can do with very little thought of what they look like while doing it. That’s we’d be free to forget about our bellies with the exception of the moments when the reality about them hits us, at which time we’d utter an earnest prayer of thanks, and then move right along.

Love you guys and your very good bellies. Happy weekend. Peace to you.