Miracle Marks

My sisters gave me a maternity photo shoot as one of my gifts, which I am really excited about. I've been looking at different pictures for inspiration about what kind of pictures I would like and it's gotten me thinking a lot about my own body and pregnant bodies in general.

There's a saying that if you find anything in nature ugly, you're not appreciating its diversity.
I feel like being a woman in this world, beauty is nearly always on the mind in one way or another. I could blog about women and beauty for hours, but suffice it to say that I find society's definition of what's "beautiful" to be extremely limiting, random, and shallow the vast majority of the time.

I would venture to say that if you find anything about pregnancy ugly, you're not appreciating its miracle. I was thinking about stretch marks in particular and how people always want to avoid them, how we always hope that after pregnancy our bodies go back to being the same as they were before pregnancy, like nothing ever happened. We idolize women who look like "they never had children", with flat stomachs, lean figures, no stretch marks or scars.... Why? Why do we want to physically "erase" the fact that our bodies participated in a miracle. We accept the emotional changes in our lives as we become parents and yet fail to embrace the physical ones.

In looking at pictures of pregnant women with many stretch marks, I wonder: why is that undesirable? What are stretch marks actually? They are really "miracle marks"- marks that God made women's bodies to grow and stretch and hold new life. Sometimes I still find myself staring in the mirror at my own body, fascinated by how its changed, and without any of my own doing or my own effort. I haven't had to manually stretch my skin or "add fertilizer" to make my baby grow. It's just happened. And it's such a miracle- such a miracle that I feel her arms and legs a little stronger and a little longer now and that she'll continue to grow and my body will continue to hold her until one day she will "be ready" to come out and my body will know what to do to help her into the world outside my womb.

It's strange being pregnant because sometimes you encounter people who are in touch with the miracle of it and they look at you in a different way, with a sense of wonder and appreciation. To me, these are the people that can see beauty and that attract beauty to their lives. They don't see an awkward "fat" woman waddling around the store looking for tomatoes. They see life. Life beginning and growing and your participation in that... and they are fascinated and amazed.

I am not, generally speaking, one of those people. I am ashamed now that I even spent many months resenting pregnant women for being able to participate in the miracle I never thought I would... I was so weak. I hope in the future, though, even if presented with similar or more difficult challenges, that I can be the one to see beauty, even and especially if it's not in myself. I hope I can reject society's view of what it means to gain weight, to have scars from c-sections, to have stretch marks and instead learn to love and embrace my body and appreciate what it is able to do and the physical marks of that...

May we all question what it is we find beautiful more often and whether those things are truly deserving of our appreciation. And may we never fail to recognize the miracles, as "normal" as they may seem, for in them lies our window to heaven and our vision of God.