When a woman carries and births a baby, she wears the physical reminders of motherhood on her body for the rest of her life — scars, dimples, lines, stretch marks. Some women see these marks as trophies from hard battles they've fought and won. Others see them as a brand-new postpartum reality they're struggling to accept. But regardless of how a woman feels about her post-pregnancy body, no mom should ever be shamed for it. Unfortunately, body shaming is exactly what one woman had to deal with after she shared a raw photo of the stretch marks she got while carrying quadruplets.
Doreen Ching, a 23-year-old mom from Malaysia, boldly shared the photo of her post-quadruplets stomach on social media.
Ching wrote on Facebook that since she gave birth to her four babies — Jensen, Jayden, Jasper, and Jazreel — two years ago, she gets a lot of questions from other moms about how to get rid of stretch marks. She decided to share a photo of what her stomach really looks like as a response. "That's the price [of pregnancy]," she said in the photo's caption, which was written in Mandarin but translated by Metro. "Even if you have money. There's no way to get rid of it."
Ching got candid about struggling to accept her new body, writing that her first reaction to her stretch marks was to break down in tears.
"Only 21 at the time, I wondered how I would be able to accept my stomach looking like this for the rest of my life," she explained in her post. "The first thing [I did when] I got out of the delivery room was to look at my stomach, and my tears came out."
Ching shared her photos looking for encouragement, but it wasn't long before the trolls came out.
Some commenters wrote that Ching looked "disgusting" and that they hope they never look like her. Others replied with links to different products and procedures she should try to eliminate her stretch marks.
One person couldn't think of anything nice to say, so they gave Ching this backhanded "compliment."
So, moms look gross but we shouldn't worry because our families love us? Um, thanks?
Others skipped the verbal insults and went straight for the "barf" emoji.
Well, same to you, hater.
Luckily, not everyone who responded to Ching's post had rude things to say.
Dozens of proud moms complimented her on her cute kids and told her to take pride in the hard work her body did to make them. "These are the tiger stripes you earned for being a mom," another person wrote.
Ching fired back at the trolls in a follow-up post on Facebook.
"I see a lot of people commenting calling me 'ugly' and it makes me very sick," she wrote in her second post. "Some men said it was all the woman's fault for wanting to have so many kids. Do you have any respect for the women of the world? Your mother? Your wife?"
Postpartum body struggles or not, this mom clearly isn't letting the haters get her down.
