Evidence

I have a scar from the day my son was born.

I think about it sometimes, not because I particularly love or hate the scar, but because of what it represents. A strange physical record of a moment that divided my life into before and after.

We have an odd relationship with our bodies. We are encouraged to change them, improve them, preserve them, but rarely to accept that they are also records. They keep evidence of what has happened to us.

Grey hairs. Wrinkles. Stretch marks. Scars.

We treat these things as imperfections, as though the ideal body is one that looks untouched by time.

But an untouched body is an impossible thing.

To be alive is to change.

My caesarean scar is simply one of the places where that change became visible.

It reminds me that my body is not an object I have been given to preserve. It is the place where my life has happened.

My son was born through this body. I became his mother. Something happened to me, and my body remembers it.

I don't think I need to call the experience beautiful to appreciate what came from it. Birth was painful. It was frightening. It changed me. My son is wonderful. Both things can be true.

The scar isn't a trophy, and it isn't something I need to hide.

It's just evidence.

Evidence that I was here.

Evidence that something happened.

Evidence that I became someone I had never been before.

Maybe that's what ageing and motherhood eventually teach us: the body isn't supposed to remain untouched.

It is supposed to bear witness.