Tough Questions & Tummy Flames

For most of my parenting career, I have gotten away with not having to handle difficult questions. I mean, I guess they’ve been asked, but… usually when Ben is around… which I’ve found pretty helpful, because he always seems to be more immediately articulate. I allow him to explain things, and I sit there and nod. I interject here and there when I feel I have something profound to add. But more often than not I allow him to guide the conversation. He’s the Aaron to my Moses.

Well… Ben wasn’t home tonight- I didn’t have my Aaron, and my luck finally ran out. We were all gathered around getting ready to sing and pray before bed, and Winnie asked if I still have my “cutie mark.” She and I have matching birthmarks on our hips. Since the girls like “My Little Pony” I started calling them our cutie marks. We are “Cutie Mark Crusaders.” It’s our little thing that we have that’s just ours.

As we were comparing our “cutie marks,” the girls saw my stretch marks and asked to see my tummy. Generally… I hate the idea of anyone seeing my tummy. But I have learned that when raising children, they learn many of their insecurities from seeing ours, and I decided that there is no reason to give them my insecurities. So I lifted my shirt to let them see.

Now, my tummy has more fat stored than it did before I had children. I know I need to concentrate on exercising and eating healthy to lose the rest of it, but it can be hard as a mommy to make the time for it, and I haven’t made it a priority, choosing to spend my time on everything else I have going on. And my kids know this.

They’ve seen my tummy before. We’ve had discussions about how a woman’s body holds onto extra fat to make sure that the baby can get enough to eat. I’ve explained to them that it is the body’s defense mechanism so that the baby can be protected. We’ve discussed how breastfeeding helps the body use the stored fat but that sometimes it doesn’t all go away. We’ve talked about how they can be my helpers in encouraging exercise and healthy eating habits. These are all familiar and comfortable discussions for me.

They know why my tummy is shaped differently than theirs. And they’ve seen the stretch marks before, too. But for whatever reason, they were especially intrigued by them tonight. As we discussed all of this again, Liz piped up and hit me with something I was not expecting: “How do a mommy and daddy make a baby?”

Wait, come again? I wasn’t ready for that. But she wasn’t done yet- “Do they go and find an eyeball and an ear and put them together?” Valid question. And one that I totally brought upon myself seeing as how I had read “Frankenstein” and had told them about how Dr. Frankenstein built his monster. But it still felt like it came out of left field, and I was not prepared.

Here I was… no Ben… so I did the best I could. I told them that humans are like other animals. We have eggs, kind of like chickens. Except the eggs are inside every girl’s body. Chickens eggs (like most animal eggs) have to be fertilized to become a baby. It’s the same with humans. The egg cannot become a baby until the daddy gets to the egg and adds its DNA. Well… I didn’t say DNA. In all reality I probably could have used technical terms but, don’t judge me, my spokesman was absent. I think I might have said something like “It’s kind of like watering a seed. The seed gets watered, and starts to grow.”

Here’s where my evasion tactics kicked in. I then went off on how the cells start to bubble up, like when you blow into a bubble pipe. They start to double over and over again and little by little a baby is formed. As they asked more questions, I decided to steer the conversation back to more comfortable territory…

“So… these marks are from my tummy growing to fit you as you grew inside me. And you know what… I used to have a tummy very much like yours. It was pretty. But I have you now, and a tummy that didn’t quite go back to shape, kind of like a balloon that has been blown up and the air was let out. It never went back to the shape it was. Maybe one day it will look a little more like it did before, but I doubt I’ll ever lose these marks. But I have you. I’d much rather have you and this tummy, than my tummy I had before, and no you.”

The girls at this point all wanted to touch my stretch marks. As they were stroking them and commenting on how they felt soft and squishy, I told them how Daddy thinks they look like flames. He likes them. Jess then looked at me and said, “I hope someday I have a tummy like yours.” And Liz and Winnie agreed, “Me too.” And just like that, my heart melted, all over again.

So… I might have totally botched Lesson 1 on reproduction. But maybe, just maybe, they will love their flames that much more when they become mommies.