Red Tadpoles

I didn't know that I didn't know what a stretch mark really was. My mother had two babies when I was in my early teens but she never got a stretch mark. I never had a stretch mark and neither did either of my sisters, who together have given birth to 8 children. Laura said she was getting stretch marks and I wanted to see them because I THOUGHT I knew what they looked like. I THOUGHT they were raised whitish lines on certain places of your belly. In fact I was CERTAIN I knew what they looked like. So Laura lifted her shirt to show me. What I saw looked like a small school of red tadpoles swimming up her belly. These things were something I've never seen before. They are long red dips on the surface of her skin. They are quite unattractive. Are all stretch marks red? Are they all cylindrical and do they all look like vertical blisterlines but are in fact indentations? Is there a way to get rid of them? Do they go away after the baby is born? If so, when? Do the same stretch marks come back in the same spots during subsequent pregnancies? Do those stretch mark creams and oils work?

My poor kid, she scans her belly and backside every day to see if the invasion has increased and almost every day it has. I feel sorry for her. We were in a maternity store a couple of weeks ago and the clerk showed her her own stretch marks----which no longer had anyone gestating under them-----and announced that her child was already over 18 months old. Laura said it looked like someone was playing tic tac toe on her stomach and she was horrified. I feel so sorry for her but I don't have any wise words to say.

Today she and Kyle took my ring to a jeweler. After much discussion and going back and forth on things, they decided to have it dipped in white gold. It was cleaned as well. It always was a sparkler and now it's a dazzler. It looks different but the same. Does this mean we're getting closer to being engaged?