sexgenderbody

clareer:

iamateenagefeminist:

feministdisney:

team-artemis:

i love my stretchmarks. 

i remember when i first got them, and they were purple and my mother told me they’d never go away, and i cried because i found them hideous.

she didn’t tell me how they change. now they’re silvery and they’re everywhere. they make my skin glitter, and i adore them. 

whatever.

that is too cute though

I remember when I first got stretch marks on my stomach and my mom saw them when we were shopping for jeans. My mother would always ask me to pull up my shirt to see how the pants fit around the waist, something I do now to people when I’m shopping with them for pants. (Also from working in a mall store selling denim, this was something I instinctively asked them… oops.) She saw the fresh crimson stripes on my stomach and immediately wondered out loud why I had stretch marks already. (I believe I was around 12 at the time.) The way she talked about them in my confusion, the way she referenced them so negatively on her own body; it shaped me to hate them as well.

My stretch marks are white and faded now, silvery as team-artemis mentioned, and to me they are marks of growth. Both literal and figurative, they map the lengthening and stretching of my skin as I grew taller, grew hips, breasts and a belly. They mark the journey of relationship with my body now, where I was at 15 wishing I could cut off the fat of my body, those striped places of flesh I hated so much, to where I am now just at 22, tracing them with my finger tips and willing them to be kissed by my lover so I can know they love them just as much as I do now.