Maren Morris on How Motherhood Made Her Love Her Body: It's Given Me 'So Much Confidence'

SHEIN Together Fest 2021/Getty

Maren Morris is feeling more confident than ever one year after giving birth to her baby boy.

Ahead of her performance at retailer Shein's virtual charity-driven Together-Fest on May 2, the country singer, 31, spoke to PEOPLE about how being a mother has taught her to love herself in her own skin.

The Grammy winner, who shares son Hayes Andrew with husband Ryan Hurd, explains that it wasn't easy at first to feel like herself after her body was "borrowed for nine plus months, plus postpartum."

"I feel like it really took me a second to realize, 'Hey, I don't need to just snap back to how I looked before to feel sexy or powerful or myself even,' " she shares.

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Catherine Powell

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However, the artist says she feels the "most comfortable now, at this age, a year after having my kid, and just knowing that I raised another human."

"I was the house, and I feel like that's given me so much confidence that I didn't have before when I was a size two," she reveals. "So I definitely feel like being a mom has made me feel really powerful in my own body because look what we're capable of."

This isn't the first time the star has been vocal about the pressures women face to adhere to a "bounce back culture."

"We're always extremely pressed to erase any evidence on our body that we had a child — that we housed a child for nine, 10 months — so I just realized how unhealthy that was for me and my workout journey to be like, 'I need to get back to where I was before,' " Morris told reporters inside the 2021 ACM Awards' virtual press room last month.

Harper Smith

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"That's not really the goal — that shouldn't be the goal, to just sort of erase the fact that you had a kid," she added.

Morris said she is "really proud of where [her] body is right now, even if it is several pounds heavier" than it was before she and Hurd welcomed son Hayes, their first child together, last March.

"It's like, 'I did something that half the population can't do.' So I think that's pretty f---ing rad," she said. "That's kind of how I came to that epiphany and was like, 'I'm gonna share this.' "

In early April, the GIRL artist posted a set of photos of herself — the first of her relaxing in a nude-colored underwear set in bed and the second of her working out in a different gray ensemble — and wrote that she is "never saying 'trying to get my body back' again."

"No one took it, I didn't lose it like a set of keys. The pressure we put on mothers to 'snap back' is insurmountable and deeply troublesome," Morris shared. "You are and always were a f---ing badass. and yeah, I'm proud."