Guest Post: There is Life After Stretch Marks by Somer of Merry Wife of Canon

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Before I became pregnant with my first son in 2006, I used to enjoy wearing string bikinis and short shirts that showed off the tight skin of my stomach. Even with the occasional weight gain I would experience as a result of stress-eating and just a general love for cheeseburgers, my stomach was always relatively flat and quite firm.

Then pregnancy happened. I always half expected to get stretch marks. There is a belief and some evidence that states that if your mother got stretch marks from her pregnancies, you may as well resign yourself to the fact that you too will get them. I was a bit caught off guard by how extensive the stretch marks got because, well, I was carrying a huge baby.

I ended up going through 18 hours of labor and suffering an emergency c-section so that I could bring a 9lb. 10 oz. baby boy into the world. For those of you who are not stunned by the size of that baby, let me just say that for an average sized woman, that is almost literally having a cow. The stretch marks during the pregnancy were quite surprising. I didn’t expect there to be so many and I didn’t expect them to be in places other than my belly.

You’d think that would be enough! But I also got stretch marks on my inner thighs and my breasts. They, of course, were not as deep as the ones on my stomach. They were just a bit of a surprise.

After having my son, I was just happy not to be pregnant anymore. It was not an easy pregnancy and it was nice not to have to carry around that gigantic belly anymore. But as my body slowly deflated, I began to notice the true repercussions of that pregnancy on my body. I joke about it now, but it was a little defeating and humiliating at first when I realized that I would have to get rid of all of my cute and young-looking clothes and trade them in for clothes that covered almost my entire body. No more short shorts. No more belly shirts. No more two piece bathing suits. Being still in my mid-twenties, I was scared of losing a bit of my youth and vitality because of the way I looked.

There was no great lightning bolt that hit my head that suddenly cured me of those insecurities. There was no catalyst in my life that forced me to view things in a different way. Time healed me. My priorities changed. I got over it. Eventually I learned to be comfortable in my own skin again. This time my confidence didn’t come from how much skin I was showing or how many heads I could turn. It came from knowing myself better and having pride in a mind and personality as well as a physical appearance. I guess you could say I grew up a little.

When pregnant with my second son, nothing much different happened. My first son was so big, that I would probably have needed to carry an elephant in my womb to stretch the skin any further. Luckily, my second baby was slightly smaller than his big brother, but had to come into the world via c-section as well because he was still big at 8 lbs. 3 oz. The experience of deflating and seeing that familiar sag in my skin this time around was not as horrifying as the first time. I had a few boo hoo moments, but I was able to bounce back to my usual “I AM AWESOMESAUCE” way of thinking.

If I don’t show pictures of what I really look like, some people may think I am exaggerating when I describe sag and a deflated look to my skin. It’s not something that I’m totally comfortable doing, showing my body to strangers like this, but I need you to see so that you can understand. I need you to know that there’s nothing wrong with the way I look. I’m beautiful this way, kids or not.

This is the front. You can see the deflated look to my belly button and the basic wrinkled look to all of the skin. By the way, you’re welcome for the mom-panties in this shot. My mom will call me screaming when she sees this.

There it is. The infamous c-section lip for all to see. It helped me a lot when I learned that I wasn’t even close to being the only person with this hanging skin at the bottom of my stomach. Also, if you look closely, you can see a very light colored mole above the red line where my pants were (another you’re welcome). That mole used to be right next to my belly button. No joke, that sucker moved like 2 inches! Isn’t that crazy?

And there it is. I’ve been living with my body in this condition for nearly 4 years now. I would be lying if I said it was always easy to look at myself now and think, “Damn I look good!” It’s hard when I am constantly bombarded with weight loss products, miracle creams for stretch marks, plastic surgery suggestions, and the countless pictures of celebrities who work themselves silly to regain pre-pregnancy bodies. I have to work at it sometimes. The point, though, is that I choose to work at it. I choose to accept myself this way and be happy that I have this body. It’s healthy, in pretty good condition considering what I’ve put it through, and it produced two healthy baby boys. That means a lot, it really does. I like to think of this body as a battle-worn canvas of brag-worthy scars. Do you remember that scene from the movie “Jaws” where the men are comparing scars they had received from their maritime adventures? They are proud of those scars and use them as bragging tools.

That is exactly how I see my body. A little wrecked, but a physical and living memory of life experiences that I will treasure all my living days. Two-piece bathing suits be damned. Anyway, they make really cute one-piece bathing suits nowadays anyhow. I’m not missing out on anything!

Somer Canon is a stay-at-home mom and smart-aleck extraordinaire spending much of her time laughing at pictures of cats on the internet. As a mother of two sons, she lives in a reality of winky pride and booby traps in the form of toy cars left on staircases.

She blogs at MerryWifeofCanon.com and shares her sometimes horrifying kitchen experiments at SmellMyPlate.com.