Marin Smith
I Lie to a Pregnant Woman
“How’s your scar?” she asks, worried.
“Scar’s fine,” I say, “you can barely see it.”
I don’t tell her: the scar is just a physical reminder that once she’s a mother she will be trying to stitch up her life continuously for the rest of it, rearranging it each time it’s flayed.
That the C-section is a dismembering, and the emergence of an entirely new identity—I don’t mean my baby, who also will emerge in all her slimy glory, or the instantly activated tractor beam that would tolerate that tiny being no place but on me, nourished by my organs as she was inside me—I mean the mother that emerged, that broke out of me with a crack like Athena from the head of Zeus, a re-membering.
I don’t tell her: even though my belly returned to a recognizable size, and I can, mercifully, sleep on my stomach again with the rest of humanity (something I so longed for in those final weeks like a languid walrus), the scar doesn’t hurt, per se, but it asserts its presence occasionally with the subtlety of a spiderweb or a tiny combed foot.
The scar whispers: I’m still here, this remnant, humming beneath your emergence into bottomless worry and delicate, precious communion between the new being you became, and the one you birthed.
Marin Smith is a wordwrangler, poet, essayist, mother, and life enthusiast. She has an MA in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Her work has been published in MER Literary, Milk Art Journal, Literary Mama, Dead Flowers Poetry Rag, Considering Disability Journal, Elephant Journal, Thought Catalog, Split Rock Review, Oregon English Journal, and forthcoming in CALYX Journal and West Trade Review. She is the co-Editor-in-Chief of Abraxas Review.
