Olivia Wilde on her post-baby body: ‘I’m a mother, and I look like one’

Olivia Wilde was happy to see her lady parts again, post-pregnancy, but she’s not unhappy if her post-baby body isn’t the same as it was before she became a mom.

“I believe in a world where mothers are not expected to shed any physical evidence of their child-bearing experience,” the actress, 31, writes in an essay for Shape magazine, which features her on its April cover.

Though her job requires her to get back into shape, she’s not aiming for “some subjective definition of perfection” designed to please others. Instead, she wants to rebuild her strength as she sheds weight. And she advises readers to know what they’re seeing in the mag’s glossy pages.

“The photos of me in this magazine have been generously constructed to show my best angles, and I assure you, good lighting has been warmly embraced,” Wilde says. “The truth is, I’m a mother, and I look like one.”

It’s been not quite a year since Wilde gave birth to Otis, her son with fiance Jason Sudeikis -- and she’s now seeing fit to share one observation she had in the first weeks of motherhood.

“You haven’t seen your vagina in months, even though it’s all her fault you’re in this situation,” she writes.

“Now that you can finally confirm that she is, in fact, still there, she isn’t the gal that you remember, and would rather you back off and give her some space (and an ice diaper) for the time being, thank you very much.”

The April issue of Shape is on newsstands now.

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