Safe Marks

The first time I looked at my post-partem body, I was standing before the hospital mirror in a hideously lit bathroom. Time has faded the exact rendering of what I found so shocking, but I know I saw something unexpected. It was alien. I had anticipated familiarity, at least some slight memory recall of what used to be. But my new Mama body was an unknown place, deeply uncomfortable and a visceral disappointment. Compounded by the trauma of that first birth, the experience I had dreamed of literally wrenched away from me, I felt and looked broken.

Its not that I had expected a hot body immediately after birth or that I carried some misbegotten expectation of emerging unmarked by the whole process.... 

 I had simply anticipated the newness to be of a storybook spring quality, like a delicate scene purposefully unfolding the new season. Call me naive, but I wanted the unfurling blossoms, the wobbly kneed lambs, the pale green daffodil shoots, the soft downy chicks, all the warm fuzzies to match the baby's freshly painted room. The fragile and tender unknown land of motherhood would be blissful and satisfying. Awe and wonder. How could it not? My body would not be perfect, but it would reflect that "new spring feeling."

A new undertaking yet in a familiar setting. The territory would not be unchartered, I would know where I was even if I didn't always know what I was doing. I held on to that foolish notion during my pregnancy like a life line, convinced that familiarity would leave me with the sense of control I believed I so desperately needed.

Yet there I stood, weak-kneed, broken, exhausted, truly terrified and crying hysterically as I tried changing back into my clothes while my mother and husband ran various last minute errands before the big homecoming.  The shock over what had transpired and the disappointment over what had not, it all fell heavy and ugly.  The ominous cloud of depression on the horizon was moving in with breath taking swiftness to settle over my shoulders.

Oh, yes. And let us not forget that wee bundle of miraculous joy and unnerving responsibility cooing away in the bassinet.

Come on in guilt, we've been waiting for you.

I felt less and less myself with every passing minute. I wanted to focus on my son, but I could not overcome the crises of self I was unexpectedly facing. It dawned at last that the territory was indeed unchartered, a new undertaking in a completely foreign land. I didn't recognize myself, in body or emotion. My 24 year old bones were shaken to the marrow.

Talk about lost.

This morning I stood by the stove fixing breakfast for my brood. Its been four years and three more babies since the storm clouds of depression have lifted. The kitchen was warm with morning stirring to life. The eldest boy walked over and for whatever reason, decided to lift the bottom hem of my shirt up a few inches. He ran his fingers over the familiar marks he knew he would find there. I let him trace the long lines back and forth. He asked the questions over again, the same ones he had asked for months.

"Mom, are your zebra stripes really scars?"

"No."

"Not scars? They look like scars."

"They are marks. Stretch marks. From when my skin stretched as far as it could go to hold you in my belly and keep you safe while you grew there."

"While I grew inside you?"

"Yes."

"That is when God put me together right?"

"Yes."

"And when He made me, your belly stretched and stretched and stretched.... and that is why we call them stretch marks?"

I smile and muss his hair with my free hand.

And then, he asks something entirely new...

"Mom? Your skin stretched that way to keep me safe is what you said. So we could also call them safe marks, right?"

I felt my throat close up a bit. 

"Yes, I suppose we could."

"I think your marks are safe marks, because you got them keeping me safe."

It was many years ago and a few babes back that I came to terms with those marks. Between the second and third water births of my sons, I remember standing in front of a different mirror, this time in our bedroom at the bungalow, tracing those ever deepening marks with my fingers.  Somewhere along the way I had stopped hating them and lamenting their existence. They were simply familiar now, in a tender and comforting way. They were the new landscape. Maybe they weren't my favorite things in the world, but I wasn't ashamed of them.

Time marches on and now a little boy, dearly loved, wants to call them safe marks.

Hmmm....

I can't think of them as "battle scars" or "honor badges," though I know some Mamas who do see them that way. They are neither ugly nor particularly victorious to me.

I suppose because for me, they can never be about what I have done.

To my mind they can only ever serve as a marker for what He has done.

They are the pile of stones, set up as a reminder of when the Lord gently led me out of that dark valley. When I followed Him into a better and deeper realization of what this life is and what this temporary body is for.

My body is marked for motherhood, for sacrifice, for a call to selfless living, for a diligent teaching I must first live out. Those marks remind me that I am not in control, I never was. They remind me to surrender my children daily.

Alone, I can not accomplish what I have been called to do. But with Him, I can.

Those dark and ragged marks, luminous in the light of His love and gentle leading.

The safe marks.

Known to my children as the lines that held them safe within me, but known to me as the daily promise that the Lord holds them safe. 

From scary marks to safe marks. Only God could transform such heavy lines into miraculous simplicity.