Stretched
(mom days before giving birth to her fourth baby) Growing up every single night once the clock struck 8:00pm and my mom had cleared dinner from the table and helped with math problems, she announced it was time for her bath. Some evenings as I walked down the hallway, now smelling of sweet soap and lotion, to say goodnight I would find her changing into her light blue nightgown baring her stomach lined with marks. Silvery purple marks lined the edges of her stomach, crawling a little bit up the sides and dancing around her naval. The older I became, the more I understood those marks meant she had been stretched. Stretched probably in ways she never would have imagined, and each stretching left visible evidence of its difficulty and her strength. Being the third oldest of seven, I saw the pregnancy cycle. Flat tummy, big tummy, baby. I knew at a young age and understood better than many of my friends that a woman has to stretch physically in order to bear a child. It wasn't ...