I read this and had to post it. This is exactly how I feel about being a mom. It is so amazing and such a precious thing to be a mom. With the marks on my stomach I can tell where each pregnancy started and ended. Now that it has been four and half years since my last "stretch," my marks are slowly fading, and I am sad. I wear my
stretch marks with pride at the miracle my body helped create!
The following is an amazing right up from my very talented friend Teressa Welborne:
Have you ever added up your birth weights before? Of all your children? I have. My four children weighed:
My oldest: 8 pounds 12 ounces
Twin #1: 9 pounds, 1 ounce
Twin #2: 7 pounds, 14 ounces
My youngest: 9 pounds, 9 ounces.
That's 35 pounds, 4 ounces of babies all together. Hot dang. How do you wrap your mind around that, much less your tummy?
The black typed numbers read like text book math to me. But my tummy and heart know the truth: it was much more than that.
Yep, my tummy has been there. It's been stretched to next week, to China, the moon, and the galaxies beyond. And lived to tell it's story.
There's a brown freckle on my right thigh, near my knee, that my stomach grew to and kissed for a season while sheltering my twins, before shrinking back, empty, void. For forty weeks I rocked my twins like Noah and his ark out to sea, only longer.
Heavy,
full,
waiting,
searching for a sign of land.
On my tummy hangs an invisible sign: “Was home to full term twins and two other singletons.” The sign took years to build. It was rough and splintery at first. And it took lots of nails and sanding and time. Now, when I tell my pregnancy, birth, and post-postpartum stories, others see the sign, too. It is beautiful. And some days, still, I marvel that I made it.
My tummy housed my children time and again. It was a good house, a strong house, a house of bricks. One that I worried at first might be a house of straw. But full term after full term, baby after baby, I discovered it's magic.
Nothing, no wind, no wolf, no one person could blow it down. And I'm thankful. Like I'm thankful for these size nine feet that carry me in circles, this racing heart that pumps my blood, and these blue eyes that take in the black and white picture of all my children gathered as if petals of a flower, and the white gold wedding ring on my left ring finger that matches Ben's perfectly.
All parts of a greater whole. A whole that I am part of.
My body wrote it's own poetry in stretch marks across my tummy and hips. A testament, a tattoo, engraving the words:
motherhood,
selflessness,
love
...on my psyche like initials carved into a tree.
Part of me wanted to resist these words {motherhood, selflessness, love}, and still does from time to time. Part of me wants to shrink away and forget, become a dandelion puff on the wind and float away, alone and free. But I'm anchored by these words, these children, these truths, that ring through me like a bell. They are as part of me as my breath, my gentle snore Ben says he sometimes hears late at night, and my mama roar, “Come here now, child.”
I carry these engravings with me across this broad and rocky road we call life, shaking it with my story again and again like a giant, surging and cracking the earth, meeting strength and possibility with each step.
I am a mama giant with a tired, stretched out tummy to prove it. And I am thankful.
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