Incomparable

by Brie Bella

  Nicole

  Despite the perpetual physical discomfort, I am a very sexual person. Feeling free to enjoy my sexuality has become a big part of who I am. I want to be part of the movement that shifts all the limiting, old-fashioned beliefs about women—that you can’t be a lady and also be sexual, that you can’t be taken seriously in business and also care about how you look. For some reason there is this lingering expectation around women that we all only get to be one thing: You can be beautiful, but then not intelligent; you can be sexy, but then you better not be a mom. Men are never criticized or minimized in the same way. It’s time that we come together as women and demand that society stop defining us as one thing only.

  I like to be sexual, and I like to be sexually dominating, because it makes me feel strong and powerful. I have always been like this. Looking back at my grade school journals, I can see that it was clear then, too. Despite what has happened to me, I have been insistent on embracing it, rather than feeling ashamed. If anything, I have been more determined to find the power in my sexuality because the formative sexual experiences that I had when I was younger left me feeling like I had no power at all.

  Many people rush to judge me, to assume that I have allowed and invited men to turn me into an object. On the contrary: I have a lot of respect for myself, and this is who I am. I love having a womanly body, I love having big breasts (even if I wasn’t born with them), I love dressing up for myself and feeling sexy. It annoys me to no end when society decides to judge women like me by assuming that high heels and tight dresses mean we don’t have any self-respect, or only find value in what men think of us. That is bullshit, and I don’t have to wear a potato sack to prove it. I love myself, I respect myself, I am sexual, and I am strong—I can kick anyone’s ass. But I would rather do it in Christian Louboutin heels and a bondage dress.

  I want younger women to have a different reality, to learn how to take care of themselves so that they don’t end up in similar straits. I wish someone had taught me about proper self-care, about keeping things that don’t belong in your vagina out of it (scented tampons, fragranced lotions, douches altogether), about wearing organic cotton underwear when you exercise so that your vagina can breathe, about the importance of getting annual physicals to be sure that you don’t have untreated cysts or abnormal pap smears. If you don’t have insurance, go somewhere where they provide essential services like checkups, breast exams, and pap smears for free. If you have plenty of money, consider making a donation, so another woman can have control over her own health, too.

  Being a woman, and owning our femininity, is an incredible source of power. Being a woman means you have the ability to enthrall, the ability to hold, the ability to create. And so much more. Women are awesome, and it’s time that we all take our power back—particularly from anyone who wants to take our sexual power away from us or make us feel ashamed for embodying it.

  Brie and I knew that we wanted to build a company. We wanted to address female sexuality and empowerment, to create products that were better for vaginas everywhere. Nothing that was going to tear the lip of your vagina, for example, and no products with parabens and phthalates. And in doing that, we also wanted to destigmatize the vagina, to stop girls from giggling about it and inspire them to get to know it!

  The name for our lingerie and clothing line, Birdiebee, actually came from the saying “the birds and the bees.” We thought the name was cute, but we also wanted to acknowledge how we learn (or don’t learn) about sexuality, which has never been taught properly in schools. For example, did you know that the clitoris wasn’t even in the 1948 edition of Gray’s Anatomy, the basic textbook in medical school? In school, we giggled through sex education class, which was about basic anatomy and pregnancy—but nothing about the importance of consent, and nothing about the power of sex to create intimacy and pleasure. And how important it is to own that for yourself, to feel like you can access it. Instead we were left to our own devices, in empty bedrooms at party houses, and there were a lot of missteps. And because of that, a lot of shame. We hope that we can help address that for younger generations.

  We believe that there has to be a world where women can be powerful, sexual creatures who can still win respect—where wanting pleasure and equal access to orgasms is not something to feel ashamed about.

  Brie

  I had twenty-one hours of labor with Birdie, which ended in an emergency C-section. I pushed for three brutal hours, but my cervix just wouldn’t open enough for her fourteen-inch head to make it through.

  I was ten days late, and while my doctor knew that I wanted to have her as “naturally” as possible, she had to induce me with Pitocin, which is a drug that starts your contractions. It puts the motion in the ocean. I insisted that I wanted to do the induction without an epidural, which in retrospect seems pretty crazy. Pitocin makes your contractions much more intense, and once the labor gets under way, an epidural is pretty much essential. But as much as my doctor cautioned against going without, she knew it was important to me, so she let me try. I labored for ten hours on Pitocin without an epidural. I have never experienced pain like that. It felt like I was being cut open from the inside. It was exhausting, on every level.

  That is not how I had planned it. Like many women who have never had children, I thought I would be able to control the process of bringing Birdie into the world. I wasn’t scared of pain, and because of that, I thought I had it in the bag. After all, I jumped off the top ropes in the ring—clearly I could handle vaginal birth without drugs. Initially I wanted the full hippie fantasy home birth. I had been taking hypno-birthing classes, I had my doula lined up, and Bryan and I had done tons of research and read every book about having the labor and birth you want.

  The thing about kids, though, is that they turn everything upside down. The entire process is an exercise in relinquishing control and understanding that there are forces far greater than you that will dictate how it’s going to go. It is an exercise in being willing to just let what will be, be, without any added pressure or expectations. It would have been far more beneficial, it turns out, to take the pressure off Birdie’s arrival. All that energy was needed for what would happen after she emerged into the world, like breastfeeding and nourishing my body for the first few months. I wish I had spent that time stocking the freezer with healthy soups, or reading about babies and sleep schedules, and not fixating on the perfect labor that was never going to be in my power to control.

  In my mind, my water would break, maybe somewhere like the grocery store—just to make it a good story—and then I would labor at home for a while, holding Bryan’s hands and bouncing on my birthing ball. My doula would signal us when it was time to go to the hospital, and then I would push—all in all, a quiet, beautiful, and peaceful birth set to a relaxing soundtrack. My first instinct had been to have Birdie in the bathtub at home, but I was willing to make the concession of going to a hospital so we could be assured of our safety. I thought that by giving up the bathtub, I had made the only concession I needed to make. By not even considering a worst-case scenario, I just set myself up to fail.

  Yes, births are important, and they are magical. But the real magic seems to be happening now that Birdie is here, touching every moment of my life. I kind of had it all backwards. I think because I subscribe to living a more natural life, I felt like I had something to prove by having a baby with as little medical intervention as possible. And I don’t know what it was exactly that I was trying to prove. In retrospect, the choice of how to approach labor and delivery—a deeply personal decision about what matters to us—has become in my opinion just another part of being a woman where we judge ourselves and each other. We often feel triggered by people who have taken a different path. I don’t know how to diffuse that, or just lower the pressure all around. But it feels like women everywhere set themselves up, and are perhaps set up by others, to fail.

  The whole situation is loaded with expectation and pressure, when really the abi
ding rule of law should be to get through it safely. By all means, shoot for the stars and declare the birth story of your dreams, but think of it instead like a birth wish instead of a birth plan. There is no shame if it doesn’t work out, and no shame in needing help. I’m kind of inclined to believe, actually, that the more we resist the help, the more the universe will be sure to show us that we need it. The more rigid we are in our expectations, the more the universe will show us that flexibility is a better path. I think about my brother, JJ, and his wife, Lauren. Lauren knew she wanted to give birth to their daughter Vivienne in a hospital. She knew she wanted an epidural, and five hours later, their baby girl was born. She didn’t stress herself out; she just picked the path that offered the greatest reward for her—pain-free, fast, and safe. There is a lot of beauty in that.

  I have tried not to beat myself up for refusing an epidural earlier. I didn’t need to be a hero while I writhed in pain. I was so depleted and so exhausted by the time the pushing started, I wonder if that wasn’t part of the reason that I needed to be cut open. I wasn’t even awake for my first breastfeeding session. They put her on my chest, and I had already passed out and was snoring. Bryan, Nicole, and my mom were looking around for help—my mom, the only one with any baby experience, didn’t breastfeed us, so she had no tips to offer. They just tried to figure it out. Bryan pushed my nipple down while Nicole held Birdie to my boob. That’s how motherhood started for me. I wish I had been awake to experience it, if only to see those two bozos trying to milk me.

  Because of my C-section, I stayed in the hospital for five days. Hilariously, when I had been preparing for my magical vaginal birth, I was operating under the delusion that I’d be able to set some sort of record and leave the hospital five hours later. The reality was that when it was time to head home, I didn’t want to leave. Not only did the nurses teach me everything about taking care of Birdie—different positions for nursing, how to change a diaper, how to swaddle, how to give her a bath—they took incredible care of me. I hadn’t been aware of how much mothering I would need myself, how good it would feel to have someone focus on how I was doing. I had hired a postpartum doula, who was great, but I really didn’t want to leave those nurses.

  Besides the transformation of becoming a mother—which really does change your whole world, in both obvious and almost imperceptible ways—the birth experience was really powerful for me precisely because it left me powerless. It taught me that despite my tenacity and resilience throughout life, despite the fact that I want to be able to do anything and everything, there are experiences that I cannot control. Control is a tough issue. Part of becoming a woman, and certainly a mother, I think, is about understanding the give and the take. When Nicole and I were kids, we had no control over anything—our home life, our school life, our future. That lack of control meant that we didn’t always feel safe, and certainly we weren’t always safe. Now that I’m an adult, control feels essential. Because I know that if I’m in the driver’s seat, I have the best shot at ensuring that my life will go how I want it to. But in that hospital, I learned that it’s okay to give in. It’s important to let other people lead when needed, and it’s essential to let people take care of you, too.

  Finding that balance is really difficult as a woman. I think many of us hold on so tightly because we’ve never experienced what it can feel like to be really held—to let go for the trust fall and relax into the arms of others, knowing that you’re going to be okay. Being a mom has now forced that issue because I know I can’t take care of Birdie alone—and I certainly can’t take care of Birdie and myself alone. I need help and support, like all women everywhere.

  I struggled, and Bryan struggled, too. In retrospect, I think he had postpartum depression. It is actually not uncommon among men—even though it is rarely discussed. I had been on a nine-month physical journey of connecting with Birdie: My body was transforming to accommodate her, in real time. He had nothing physical to attach to—he just had books, and he read a lot of them. But no book can prepare you for the real thing—for this tiny, needy creature who has wants and needs that you have to learn on the fly. I got to do the nursing, so his duties were diapering and swaddling. Birdie hated both of those activities with a certain ferocity. It started to wear on him: I had the happy Bird; he had the angry Bird who would have throttled him if she’d had more strength. I also think that he assumed he could just learn, through books and through doing, how to be a dad. But it’s not always a natural acclimation or something that you just know how to do. That’s another big falsehood in our culture, that it’s so “natural” that you take to it without effort. I had to teach him how to be a dad—primarily through admonition and nagging. We didn’t have anyone around who could model it for him. It is a tough learning curve, not something to be dismissed.

  There seems to be momentum and awareness in the culture building around this idea that parenting is a community endeavor. The cycle of mothering needs to extend far beyond the parent/child relationship—mothers need mothers, too. And fathers need role models. There seems to be a shift as well in the idea that it’s much healthier to live our lives without judgment, however well intended that judgment might be.

  Nicole

  Speaking of judgment, I’ve had many well-documented struggles about my own body. For most of our WWE careers, I’ve been referred to as the “Fat Twin” or the “Chunky Bella.” It’s a funny thing, because I do like my body. I’m continually amazed by what I’m able to do with it—I’ve always been an athlete, and I’ve always been able to rely on it, even when I was wrestling with a broken neck. But it’s still a struggle when I’m continually taunted for being ten pounds overweight. The entertainment industry is like that; you can never be thin enough.

  I also have to see myself in photographs constantly, and on TV. That old saying that the camera adds ten pounds is true, and it’s rough. When you’re our height, ten pounds is a lot. When I’m skinnier, I’m more photogenic. If I didn’t have to see so many photos, and particularly photos at crazy angles, I wouldn’t be so hard on myself. Plus, getting down to my goal weight is tough. It only happens when I’m extremely strict with myself and work out all the time. That’s not typically how I like to roll. I love good wine and long dinners out, and I certainly eat too much black licorice. According to people who know me well, I have a raging case of SOMs, which translates to “Start on Monday.” I’d just much rather have a great time in the moment.

  In the mid-1990s, Sunny was one of the female wrestling stars. She was a manager and she didn’t actually wrestle, but she was big-time in WWE because she was the first woman who was part of the company as a pinup—she was a sex symbol for a lot of high school boys. When Brie and I made it to the main stage, she wrote a Facebook post about how she thought I was fat. She wrote: “There’s no excuse for any of those girls in their early 20s to get a little chubby. Wait until they hit 35 and everything slows the f–k down. Then what? They are getting paid to look a certain way.” She felt terrible about it after, and when she was inducted into the hall of fame, she pulled me aside to apologize. She was clearly nervous to see me. But I don’t blame her, either, as it was emblematic of the culture. Wrestling, in particular, is very body oriented. They were always hard on the women who gained five pounds. They would call you into the office and talk to you about it. It has changed now.

  Brie

  On the flip side, I have always been a twig—Nicole and Nattie and the other wrestlers would call me a baby deer, because I was so slight compared to some of the other women. I’ve always been like that, and have always been deliberate about staying that way, which was never that hard until I had Birdie.

  I gained close to fifty pounds when I was pregnant, despite the fact that I hiked and moved and ate pretty well throughout. It was a struggle to get it off, even with the support of my trainer, who worked hard to get me back into fighting shape for the ring. The last ten pounds were almost impossible. And because of the C-section, my stomach, which has
always been flat and toned, is a mess. I don’t know if it will ever be ready to be displayed in public again. But as much as I wanted to hide, I also knew that I needed to reveal my post-baby body in Birdiebee, to show women that like many of them, I was struggling to put myself back together. Too often, women in the spotlight miraculously get the weight off. Or maybe didn’t gain much to begin with, but they set a standard that is far from reality for most of us. I wanted women to see that it was hard for me, too. It’s been important for me to post shots of my soft mom body in Birdiebee intimates—I’ve instructed the team not to Photoshop me, either. Instead, I want to show everything. Hopefully, other women can feel connected and know that they’re not alone.

  I’ve enjoyed these different seasons of my body, from being tiny and toned to having the world’s largest belly for my eight-pound, ten-ounce baby girl, to being a soft 140 pounds now. Before Birdie, I had never weighed more than 130 pounds. This new body is an adjustment, and I’m not comfortable believing that it’s permanent. While I’ve enjoyed this ride, I am looking forward to feeling like myself again, specifically when it’s time to go full-on with my wrestling gear, when all parts of you are hanging out in the ring.