FBW: Lerner from Stay at Home Babe (Ms. November)

FBW stands for Featured Blogger of the Week. Each week we will feature one of our calendar ladies or gentleman. Mondays will be a post written by the FBW and Wednesdays will be an interview of the FBW. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

I didn’t know the profits of the calendar were being donated to Violence UnSilenced until after I’d agreed to do it–so I can’t say that’s why I’m doing it–but it is why I’m really glad that I’m doing it. For almost ten years of my childhood, I was sexually abused. I grew up identifying my body as a sex object and my self-worth was wrapped up in how much sexual attention I got with it. I wasn’t violently raped, I was slowly and methodically molested. I was groomed into a girl who thought that sex was the most valid form of affection, not that my body was a temple.

Through pregnancy and motherhood I developed a whole new respect for my body, a whole new perspective on beauty and a completely different standard of what’s sexy. Motherhood healed me. Watching my children reach the age that my molestation began, watching them grow past that age and still have their innocence, watching them be so little and still need so much protection—those are the times that have helped to pull me past the guilt and shame of feeling like I was the one who did something wrong.

Becoming a mother was a turning point in my life, when I stopped living my life as a victim and started living my life as a survivor. I survived what had happened to me and I survived the way I lived my life after. I started loving and allowing myself to be loved.

I think it’s important, as a woman—especially as a mother—to have those moments when I can think of myself as beautiful; to take that time to nourish myself and not just my family; to be myself outside of the roles I have in my day-to-day life and independent of who I was in the past. I usually find those moments while soaking in the tub. Because let’s face it, there’s hardly a better way to end the day than soaking in a tub with aromatherapy salts and candles.

November 2012, you will find a picture of me soaking in the tub washing away the stress and worries of surviving another day of motherhood. It’s a tradition that started when I was nine months pregnant with my son. I soaked in the tub every night with my big ol’ pregnant belly breaking through the water like a big, bare island. Now it’s a time for me to be quiet, alone and naked in my own skin.

Lerner is an American living in the UK since 2008 when she married her English husband. She chases two kids, two cats, two guinea pigs and four chickens around all day, cooks anything that sits still long enough and writes whenever she can steal away a moment at the keyboard. You can read these stolen moments at her blog (with moxy) Stay At Home Babe on Twitter and Facebook.