The Stretch Mark Club

Chapter 6: No Love Lost

I wish my children could appreciate how simple their lives are right now. They have no idea how complicated life will be.

Jasmine

3 Months Old…

“Ya wanna?” Everett asked and wiggled his eyebrows at me. I knew what this meant. Every woman knows what this means. In response, Zoe woke up crying and I shrugged. Not this time, buddy.

“How often do you have sex now that you have the kids?” I asked Riley and Jasmine the next day over coffee. The kids were lined up next to the table in their car seats.

Riley laughed.

“Okay,” I admitted. “Probably not the right person to ask.” I turned to Jasmine. She looked up at the ceiling, counting.

“Once,” she said.

“A week?”

She raised her eyebrows at me. “Since I had the twins.”

I gasped before I could stop myself. “And here I came in today looking for sympathy.”

“How about you?’ Riley asked.

I shrugged. “Once every week or two.”

“That’s not bad,” she said. “Why are you asking?”

“I don’t know,” I said and took a sip of my coffee, considering my words. “I guess sometimes it just doesn’t feel like enough.”

“Mija, you have a baby,” Jasmine said. “You can’t expect to have sex as much as you used to. How many times did you do it before?”

“At least twice a week. Sometimes up to four.”

“Now you’re just showing off,” Riley scoffed. I laughed.

“I think the real question is why you’re worried about it,” Jasmine said.

As close as Riley, Jasmine and I were, it was easy to forget we’d only known each other for four months. They didn’t know me when Everett and I got married. If they did, they would know there was a very real possibility the only reason Everett and I got married is because I was pregnant. Everett always assured me we would have gotten married anyway, but it was hard to accept I would never really know for sure.

“Sometimes it seems like it’s not enough for Everett,” I said. I didn’t say how much deeper my fears ran--that Everett would regret marrying me, that he would regret staying for a child he never planned for, that one day he would leave.

“In most cases,” Riley said, “I would say screw him. Any man who doesn’t understand what your body has gone through and how hard it is to take care of a baby all day is an ass. But I know Everett.” She squeezed my hand. “He loves you. He would never want you to push yourself further than you were ready to go.”

I nodded. I wished it were that easy for me to believe. “I just don’t feel like myself anymore,” I said, my voice shaky. “I don’t even recognize my own body. I don’t feel comfortable in it.”

“Mija, trust me. I know what you’re going through. I carried double what you did,” Jasmine said.

My laugh was throaty.

“It’ll come back,” Riley said. “You’ll come back. It’s going to take some time to adjust. It took you ten months for your body to expand. You can’t expect it to shrink back down in ten weeks.”

“What about my mind?” I asked.

“Well, that could take even longer.”

That night, inspired by our talk, I set out to seduce Everett. I would find my pre-pregnancy vixen if I had to hunt her down and drag her back by the hair. I made pasta, about the easiest romantic food I could manage to whip up, and lit candles. I got Zoe down for a nap five minutes before I expected Everett to be home and at the last minute, decided to throw on something mildly sexy, though none of my old lingerie fit anymore.