Here’s a post-pregnancy side effect you might not know about

I was lying in bed with my husband recently when he said something that cut me to the core.

I put him on top as usual to sleep, and he made a joke about my deflated post-baby breasts.

“I’ll have to call you my shrunken-chested pirate,” he said with a laugh.

“A Combination of Sadness and Fury”

It caught me completely by surprise.

As I lay there feeling self-conscious and trying to cover my wrinkled breasts, I felt a combination of sadness and anger welling up.

I looked at my chest and couldn’t help myself.

“Actually, these shrunken breasts have fed three of your children,” I finally managed to say.

I left the room and my husband immediately realized that he had said the wrong thing and hurt my feelings.

He apologized and tried to push back, saying he wasn’t a “breast guy” anyway and didn’t care that my breasts didn’t look like they did when we met in our 20s. Oh.

The more he talked, the worse it got. He was digging himself a deeper hole with every muddled, thoughtless comment he made.

“Breastfeeding will do that sometimes”

I let him go and forgave him, but his inappropriate joke hurt. I think the reason it hurt so much was because I know my breasts will never look the same after breastfeeding, as much as I enjoyed the experience.

My mother was lucky in this regard. She was pretty flat chested like me before kids, but after my siblings and I were born, she ended up bigger and busier.

not me. I went the other way. What was once a 10B is now a 10A at best, and they seem to be going further south with each passing year.

I was brutally reminded of this recently when I tried on my old formal school dress and the cups felt like they were at my neck. I told my mom and asked her opinion, which you can always count on to be the truth.

“Yes, honey, I see what you mean. Breastfeeding will do that sometimes,” she said.

“I thought about getting implants”

After giving birth to my second child, I was so upset about the state of my sagging, balloon-like breasts that I even considered getting implants.

Three of my girlfriends had gone that route and raved about how much safer they felt afterwards.

But to my husband’s credit, he begged me not to go ahead with the surgery because of any possible health complications that could arise with the implants, so I let the idea go and tried to embrace my new body.

Mostly, I’ve embraced the changes that go hand in hand with the blessing that is motherhood. I guess I was just feeling sensitive when my husband made that inappropriate joke.

He now knows that my postpartum body is off limits when it comes to teasing. Also, I’m not going to take any swipes at his expanding waistline or drooping testicles.

Not that I ever would.