The marks of maternity

Whether you get stretch marks depends on genes not creams, says Alison Sparkes

A teenage girl was in the pool changing room, twisting herself like a pipe cleaner, trying to look at the backs of her thighs. Lissom and lean, pearly and pert, this post-pubescent nymph pulled down her brows on a face ten years away from its first wrinkle and wailed:
‘See. Look! I can never go on the beach without my shorts again.’
Her friend peered anxiously at her.
‘I think you’re worrying too much. They hardly show.’
‘They do! ’ shrieked the deformed one. ‘Look at them! I’ve got stretch marks.’

I’d had enough. I strode over, wrapped in my towel.
‘Let me see.’ I glanced at her dimple-free skin and could just make out the tiniest of silvery lines – barely discernible, like a watermark on posh paper.
‘Look, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Those aren’t stretch marks. These are.’
And, rather brutally perhaps, I showed her the real thing.

Having earned stretch marks that make me look as if I’ve been clawed by a grizzly bear, the impact was immediate. They both looked aghast. In their frightened eyes I could see Britain’s future population dropping further.

Politely, they agreed that perhaps I had the edge on stretch marks. It was a bit unfair, though, because it wasn’t long after the birth of my second baby. The rifts were still violently pink. Now they’ve settled to silvery-violet and I no longer look as if I might unravel like a ball of wool.

I inherited the kind of skin with all the elasticity of damp rice paper, so the odds were never good where stretch marks were concerned. Yet I barely notice them these days and even wore a bikini last summer on the day it didn’t rain.

Like many first time mums, stretch marks crept up on me quietly and then struck, in the middle of the night, like an earthquake. It was ages before I realised the extent of the disaster, simply because I couldn’t see below my waist. My sister eventually broke the bad news. I was telling her, as I massaged in the anti-stretch mark cream, that I didn’t seem to have a problem with them. Nicky smothered a snort.

She got a mirror and tilted it. The pattern of cracks rising from my groin to my belly button were the sort of thing you see in Channel 4 documentaries, following some cataclysmic shifting of tectonic plates.

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The marks of maternity