NOT ME.
Yes, that is my right hip in all of it’s blubbery, pasty Irish glory. & the guests of honor, of course — my stretch marks!
I chuckle when pregnant women run screaming to their local Target, ravishing the cream isles at the first sign of a pink line on their hips or belly. Ladies, please. I was BORN with stretch marks. You do not get to Cindy Crawford’s height without battle wounds! Truly, I think it was 5th grade when I noticed my first stretchie in ballet class. Thankfully, I was too young for it to register horror, so I used to poke at it & scratch it while we stretched on the floor (toes pointed, of course), wondering “WHAT IS THIS ODD PINK LIGHTENING BOLT?” I was also wearing a bra by the fourth grade, so it is no shock that God marked me by my 11th birthday.
By my 16th birthday, my thighs, breasts, ass, & hips were marked with white ragged lines. & I still rocked a bikini on the beach as a teenager. So please…forgive my eye roll at any woman who panics at her first stretch when she’s 30 due to carrying another human being. Sympathy can be found in the dictionary between shit & syphilis.
Oddly enough, Harrison has yet to give me any new stretch marks…he’s just expanding the old-school members of The League of Blair’s Fat Butt. It’s kind of odd to watch a white stretch get a pink tip on it as it expands…interesting. I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen constellation patterns forming, which is mildly exciting & may deem the need for an evening with a Sharpie marker.
I see stretchies as a simple rite of passage — into adolescence, into motherhood, into being a female. Embrace them. & put down the effing cream, okay? Don’t you think that Bill Gates would have competition if someone really found a $10 cream that cured stretch marks?
