Five Stages of Stretchmarks

1

As my belly grows full of water, blood, and the body of my daughter, my skin stretches. Thick ropes of blood lie in twisted rivers, brimming to the surface as if one scratch could burst me open and bleed me dry. With five weeks left in my pregnancy, I am not sure which direction I have left to grow. Living is labored by the globe of my belly.

I perform an anxious nightly ritual, arching my spine backward, angling my belly toward the bathroom mirror. My stretching skin ripples into divots painted shades of light pink and distant purples. An equator splits me in half, running from pubic bone to navel, my linea nigra.

Each day I take a blurry picture with my phone’s self-facing camera. I attempt to map my shifting landscape, indigo valleys growing darker between my stretching ridges. No lotions, creams, or pinching keep them from cropping up in deep furrows. I track their spreading until they encircle my belly button in a halo that turns my body into a makeshift sun, covered in piercing rays.  

2

On the evening of my daughter’s birth, with teeth-gritting, ripping force, I sent her rippling through the channels of my lower abdomen and then out, my skin stretching farther to expel her seven-pound form. She emerged waxy, pale, and screaming. When set to rest on the soft hill of my stomach, she calmed. Her knees pressed into the sack of my stomach, toes dipping into the hollow of my navel, cheek resting on the mounds of my breasts. She lay sheltered in my topography.   

3

Days later, as my milk comes in, my stomach convulses back: intestines, kidneys, stomach, liver slowly migrate to their originally assigned positions. My uterus contracts, and blood leaks out of me for weeks.

Each day, I explore the new patterns of my body, lifting my stomach, pinching it over my thumbs to turn the base to my eyes for inspection. My body now replicates rippled sand under ocean waves. My body feels like a foreign wasteland. I am not my own. I do not know this body.

4 

Years have passed since my daughter lived inside of me. But tonight, and every night, before I fall asleep, I press my fingers into the softness of my lower belly and grasp the soft cusp that is my stomach. That still feels so unfamiliar, so unlike myself.

I mindlessly run my fingertips through my skin’s warbly ridges. Rubbing back and forth across them, I marvel at their almost mathematical arrangement. The depressions mark the spots where my skin will never heal closer together. The once deep red ridges have faded to bright white that refuses to tan despite hours in the sun. My skin: carved deep with silver linings.  

5

Almost daily, my daughter lifts my shirt to see my “bewwy.” She lifts her own shirt and pats her belly too. She pokes her fingers deep into my softness and pats my navel with a flat palm marveling at the suctioning echo. When sleepy, she bends down to rest her cheek on my stomach. She kisses my skin, and I burst into a belly laugh.

Often she runs to me, panting and smiling, showcasing her stomach. She has painted it into chaos with her markers. She gurgles, “baff, baff, baff, baff.” So I fill the tub. I wipe her belly with soap, scrub it with silky soft sponge. I fill my hands with lotion after her bath and slather it over her smooth stomach.

And after a diaper change, and whenever she lifts her shirt to ask, I kiss her belly again and again and again. My spine and neck aren’t flexible enough to bend down to kiss my own “bewwy.” I am continually in awe at the way it seems this girl loves my body almost as much as I love hers. She snuggles and sighs into my curves, so at home. The act of caring for her stitches and shrinks something back together inside of me. I feel myself growing fuller to embrace this new form that held her and holds her and will always have room for her. That has held me and holds me and will continue to house me. I kiss her belly softly, the way I wish to curl my spine tight and bend down to kiss my own.

Megan McOmber is currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction at BYU. She has published in Mount Hope Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, The Pinch, Hunger Mountain, and was the 2023 and 2024 David O. Mckay essay contest winner.

Art by Justin Wilkens