My Name Is Adaeze, and I Need to Tell You Something I Didn’t Say Out Loud for Almost Three Years

I have three children. My last, my daughter Zara, is the reason I’m writing this to you today. And for three years after she was born, I could not stand in front of a mirror without wanting to look away.

By the time Zara turned two, I had stopped wearing anything fitted — not just for special occasions, everyday clothes too. I remember standing in Balogun Market one Saturday, deliberately walking past a rack of beautiful ankara gowns because I already knew how it would sit on me.

My husband, Emeka, never said a single unkind word about it. But I started watching him. I noticed when his eyes lingered a second too long on Instagram. I stopped changing clothes in front of him entirely.

“Madam, we go need adjust am well well for your front here o,” my tailor said at a fitting, not unkindly, just matter-of-factly. I laughed it off in the shop. I cried in the car outside.

Here is everything I tried, in order, over three years:

The turning point came at Christmas. My cousin Nkechi, a UK-trained physiotherapist, noticed my waist trainer under my buba and asked how long I’d been wearing it. Three years, I told her.

She had me lie down in my kitchen and pressed two fingers just above my belly button. I felt them sink into a real, physical gap. “Adaeze,” she said, “this is not fat. This is diastasis recti. No amount of sit-ups or waist training was ever going to fix this.”

I combined what she taught me with my mother’s traditional binding technique — corrected this time — and gave myself fourteen days. By day seven, the gap had visibly narrowed. By day fourteen, I put on a fitted gown I’d kept for two years out of stubborn hope. It fit.

I cried in that dress. Not because my body was “perfect.” Because for the first time in three years, I recognized myself. I wrote everything down so you don’t have to spend three years finding it the way I did.