The abdominoplasty scar bisects my body: thin red equator feathery at my hips,
mottled rope above the pubic bone. Before motherhood, the world of my belly
was flat, a blank page. Now, its vellum is etched with ancient cartography:
scrawled stretch marks, evidence of the body’s wisdom—joints cranked open, sinew
softened, cartilage and bone expanding, ribs and pelvis making way for one, two,
three souls to grow in a saltwater globe, faces pressing the womb’s porthole.
My first, a girl, measured ten pounds on the ultrasound, just shy of nine at birth.
I cried when I heard c-section—what about my doula, prenatal yoga, marathoner’s
endurance, migraineur’s pain tolerance? My midwife great-great-grandmother
who, having borne eleven children, assisted the country doctor at her neighbors’
home births? My own mother, who delivered my sister and me, footling breech
twins, with no anesthesia? I wanted to surrender to instinct, the primal power
of the birthing body—but my cervix refused to dilate past a fingertip, my firstborn’s
head too large to pass narrow, novice hips. Three years later, I submitted to the scalpel
again: boy/girl twins who disintegrated my abdominal fascia, its gossamer no match
for two amniotic sacs, placentas, humans. After, my guts protruded through a ravine
between the rectus abdominis, bellybutton punched out. At the postpartum checkup,
baby feet poking the tender cavity of my deflated torso, the doctor said I can palpate
your aorta and your viscera have no protection. It made sense, this defenseless
underbelly, love having blown me wide open at my prime meridian—at times I wanted
to tuck my children back inside for safe-keeping but a mother can’t live with an abyss
at her core. So the surgeon sliced my belly hip to hip, tenting the flap of skin
to stitch me stem to sternum along the linea alba, fixing the umbilical hernia, sucking
fat from flanks, trimming a hemline of excess tissue and puncturing a button hole
for my newly crooked navel. For ten days, drains at my groin siphoned honey-colored fluid;
for four weeks I hunched like a crone; for more than a month I couldn’t cradle my babies’
sweet heft or cuddle my toddler, my thrice-cut incision bandaged and weeping,
but O blessed be my stomach’s scarred art, fleshy omphalos that parted
for three blood-streaked heads to dawn.
