How Queen Constance saved my baby belly
Blogging superstar and queen of queens Constance Hall hits New Zealand next week. Behind her brash message is a rock’n’roll childhood and secret shyness.
There were lots of surprises along the way when I became a mum. My body changed shape and never quite pinged back, my earning power and identity were blown apart and it’s taken years to reconfigure. I loved my children madly deeply, but I craved the old me and wondered if I’d ever see her again. These were my secret thoughts that I didn’t discuss at coffee group. I just quietly compared myself to other women and let the selfdoubt consume me. Nobody says you look sexy in your undies with a post-baby belly, nobody actively celebrates your new body. We’re taught to work hard to get it back to normal (whatever that is) and judged as a failure if we don’t. How exhausting. My friend Emma and I had our first babies around the same time. Her next pregnancy was twins. After that pregnancy she was left with extra skin and scar tissue that no amount of exercise was going to fix. Emma didn’t like her tummy and talked with me about getting a tummy tuck which I supported. If it was going to make her feel better, I reasoned. But Emma changed her mind. ‘She had made several appointments with plastic surgeons before seeing Constance’s photo of her post-twins tummy. To Emma, she looked confident and beautiful. All the appointments were cancelled. The photo in question was a game-changer, not just for Emma. Constance in her undies, child on hip, stretch marks and round post-baby belly, looking proud and healthy. I had never seen anything like it.
Constance asked other women to post their own ‘‘flawed regal’’ bodies and to be proud. She added the hashtag #likeaqueen. This connected deeply with thousands of women who posted their own pictures, and the queen movement was born. In her self-published book Like a
Queen Constance explains. ‘‘Queens see beauty, queens see hilarity, queens see talent, queens see queens. If you want to be a queen, then you’re a queen.’’
This is what defines Constance Hall. In a time where it’s more normal to judge other women for their parenting, bodies, messy houses, or inability to cope; she emphatically supports them. Choosing to acknowledge how hard parenting is, exposing her own flaws, her doubts, her everything. No filter. Reading her posts is like taking a holiday from myself. An exhale, a glass of wine after a long day.
The Women’s Collective – a trailblazing organisation that hosts ‘‘community love projects’’ encouraging discussions where people feel free to let their guard down, have worked hard to bring Constance to New Zealand next week. They want to recreate in person what she brings women online. Kia ora.
Constance radiates a sort of chaotic childlike glee; she’s beautiful with a nose ring, tattoos and a sun tan. She probably drives but I picture her walking barefoot everywhere, butterflies following her as she takes a swig from a silver hip flask.
A hairdresser from Perth. Four kids. Married to Bill. Those are the basics. But despite being known for her writing, she’s dyslexic. She left school at 14 and – fun fact – she was on Big
Brother Australia. The first to be kicked off in 2005 after not revealing to the producers she had a boyfriend. Not playing by the rules, since always.
Her online persona of warts and all, full truth, all access, is interestingly at odds with her reallife anxiety. She’s been seeing a psychologist for years to help her, but her ‘‘beautiful psyc’’ moved states recently so she’s been doing it alone.
‘‘My childhood was really happy but it was non-conventional. Our parents were really out there. My dad’s an artist, my mum’s a single mum and they were both addicted to heroin when we were younger. My mum went out with this awesome guy who was in a band when we were younger so I spent my childhood in the pubs and I just loved every second of it.’’
Take this as an isolated comment and you’ll form your own opinion of Constance. I’ll wager it’s not positive. Perhaps you’ll question how a woman who grew up surrounded by drugs and rock music could ever go on to be a good mother.
Maybe you’ll think that how a person begins their life is how they’ll continue. It’s so easy to judge people without knowing them. Every mother will tell you that.
‘‘We had to deal with everyone in our suburb looking down on us constantly, I always had that little feeling like I wasn’t quite good enough for everyone else. But everything mum did then has put me in the position I am now, I think it’s given me a bit of wisdom, and compassion and I’m definitely not scared to raise my kids in an unconventional way.’’
But what is unconventional? Putting fun and spending time together over having a spotless floor? Because that sounds like it should be the norm.
‘‘I love my kids and I’ll do everything for them but sometimes they have baked beans for dinner and sometimes we don’t even do homework because we wanna have fun and that’s just the way we are.’’
When we talk she brings up her ‘‘fat rolls and hairy vag’’.
I probably should be blushing but I’m not shocked. It’s exactly the kind of comment she is famous for.
Constance has a warm, husky voice and peppers each sentence with swear words. It’s easy to assume that she’s using shock tactics to titillate her readers.
But she doesn’t think like that. ‘‘It’s impossible for me not to be honest, which is why I struggle with my interviews because people go ‘oh my God, I can’t believe you said that’.’’
Constance doesn’t self-edit – she’s popular because she’s brutally honest about her struggles as a mother, which serves to disarm and unify the rest of us.
Something about the way she speaks makes me feel at ease. Like a friend I’ve not seen in a while. It’s a tone that comes through in her writing. Confessional and genuine.
‘‘On my blog and Facebook I share the things that I completely f... up. I share the things I feel I learned something from, I try and keep everything in a really positive light for chicks because I feel like we have enough negativity.’’
Well, she certainly gets her fair share. As soon as I’d tweeted that I’d interviewed her a reply pinged up: ‘‘Make her go away, why is this thing even remotely famous?’’
Constance muses that she’s always coming up against people who don’t ‘‘get’’ her. Just this month another blogger, The Notorious Mum Lisa Shearon, spoke out against Constance and her movement. ‘‘I know it’s quite fashionable at the moment to be all, like, LOOK AT MY BELLY ROLLS, but I’m not down with that. Be proud of your baby-breeding body – OF COURSE – but don’t be ashamed to aspire to being fit and healthy.’’
Constance replied to Lisa, and Lisa to Constance and then an all out fanon-fan attack erupted triggered an anxiety attack in Constance who posted on her Facebook page that she was hiding in a hotel room, having a breakdown. Her queens in full protection mode came from every side abusing Lisa online and triggering her own anxiety attack. It was a mess.
On The Project this week Constance talked about it and suggested the two women share a wine and talk it over. To say that publicly after being so hurt by Lisa’s post was a very brave move. I don’t know if I’d have been able to extend an olive branch quite so easily. But this is who Constance is and what she’s about.
‘‘People are constantly writing stories about how they don’t get the movement, they don’t like what I’m doing and I make them cringe. But then I go to my events and I had a woman crying in my arms recently and told me she decided not to kill herself because of my group of women.
‘‘It was one of those moments where I thought, you know 4 million chicks might hate me but the ones that don’t, well I owe it to them and I owe it to myself to keep going.’’
Constance has been blogging for 10 years. But it was her post about ‘‘parent sex’’ in January that went viral and changed things. ‘‘You know what parent sex is, it’s that 3.5 minutes you get in between changing nappies and making food ... Where you realise it’s been almost a month since you banged and are starting to feel like flatmates … Well mine was pretty impressed, even if I just lied there, saggy boobs, baby belly pouch, hairy minge and all, he still thinks I’m amazing.’’ Oh lol, oh cringe, oh reality. For me, the hardest thing I have ever done is have two children. Heartbursting with love but bone-crushingly difficult and at times, lonely. ‘‘I’ve definitely felt isolated as a mum and it’s possibly the reason I do what I do, because that isolation is a killer, we all feel like we’re really alone,’’ Constance explains. It strikes me that it’s not just location we’re talking about, it’s feeling mentally and emotionally isolated from one another. ‘‘There is an assumption that to show your vulnerability is to be weak. The opposite is true. Showing the cracks lets the light in and in this case the light is a community. Or an online village. I share Emma’s story with Constance. She is thrilled. ‘‘That’s so awesome!’’ I can hear how happy that’s made her.
Women’s Collective present Constance Hall with MC Jaquie Brown. Auckland on Wednesday, November 9; Christchurch on November 11; Wellington on November 12. Tickets through womenscollective.co.nz