The marks of maternity

After a subdued five minutes, I got chocolate and began to eat to forget…After all, how you fare with stretch marks depends on your genes. You can’t avoid them – they’re the skin’s natural way of dealing with an epidermal strain, beyond the regular call of duty. Look to your mother to gauge your fate. Fortunately, not everyone gets my skin. Friends of mine with more olive complexions seem to have got away with a few hairline cracks. And younger, fitter women seem to get away with it better too. You know, the kind who drop a healthy eight-pounder, nip down the gym and pop back into shape with a muted sucking noise, in just under ten days. On the other hand, if you take pregnancy as a licence to eat for a family of six, (as I did) you’re going to end up looking like you’ve carried a family of six.

Stretch mark prevention creams are universally acknowledged to be useless. Think about it. It’s like trying to hold back the Severn Bore with a bit of cling film. But stretch mark creams will always exist. Like aphrodisiacs and magic weight loss teas – they’re a triumph of hope over common sense.

The one thing I can say for them is that they smell lovely, and they do feel nice, particularly on those grim third trimester evenings when you feel like you’re going to rip asunder if someone gives you a push or a nasty look. I massaged mine in nightly, throughout the last third of both pregnancies, and I think that was beneficial in itself. It’s also nice to get a partner to do it. Ideally, your own.

Ultimately, as Tom Conti said in ‘Shirley Valentine’, stretch marks are a part of you and you should be proud of them. (Although I don’t necessarily go along with the idea of painting them with glitter and waving them at the postman.) And there’s really no point in worrying about how they’ll look on the beach next summer. Out of 365 days a year, with your budget and your strength now stretched as far as your beleaguered belly, how much time on the beach do you reckon you’ll get?