“Sooo…..Did your innie become an outie?”  Kate’s rocking the maternity farm overalls these days.  She’s working on the cafe computer when I come in to start preparing food for the weekend.

“Hell yeah!” 

“It goes back in, right?”

 I lift my shirt and show her my post-maternity paunch.  “Sort of.  It just kind of droops and sags now.  Pretty much like everything else.”  My post-partum belly receded over time, but my fair skin never snapped back into shape.  It holds on to the memory of what happened.  Twice.

Kate doesn’t appear comforted by my answer.  

I remember that angst.  It took me nearly thirty years to accept my body.  I had a short window to enjoy it before I got pregnant for the first time at 29.  Unsure how I was going to feel about parenthood, I mourned the impending loss of my shape before my abdomen began to grow.  Before becoming pregnant, Bob would lie beside me in bed, his hand sliding down my waist, his words expressing awe at each curve and turn.  The day after I learned I was pregnant, with teary eyes I asked him to snap a picture of my middle so that I could remember it.

I grab my belly flab now and give it a shake.  “Ula used to call this my buka buka,” I remember fondly her fascination with that paunch, how she’d flip it around in her toddler fingers, chanting buka buka over and over again.  The name stuck.   “You get to earn this,” I tell her, pushing aside the memories of my flat tummy and perky breasts as I wad up my droopy abdomen and belly button and shove them back under my clothes.  “My buka buka is like a purple heart.  I earned it for bravery, and for everything that came after.   It freaked me out when I first got pregnant, but now I wouldn’t give it up for the world.”

Kate laughs as she heads back up to the farm.  I hope I’ve given her honest encouragement.  

But I can’t let go of the conversation, this idea that I had to surrender a little bit of my outer beauty in order to bring children into my life.  I’m thinking of it as I stare into the bathroom mirror while Bob makes our morning coffee.  I squint and lean forward, trying to decide if the newest unexplained blemish on my face warrants another trip to the dermatologist for a biopsy.  I sigh.  I might have surrendered my hourglass figure prematurely in exchange for children, but sooner or later, the effects of aging hit everyone.  At least I got a couple great kids in the process.  

I pull my glasses off and squint at the mirror.  “Shit!”  I exclaim, noticing the bags under my eyes.  “I think I’m finally at the point where I look better with my glasses on than with them off!”  

I look over at Bob for some kind of gentlemanly refute.  It’s only appropriate he should come up with something conciliatory and complimentary to offset my vain angst.  He doesn’t even look up.  He’s busy screwing up his eyes as he stares at his phone, trying to read the emails.  “I guess that’s the point of my own vision loss,” he tosses over his shoulder.  “I can’t tell the difference.”

I swat him and we head out for our morning hike, where we can walk and sit side-by-side, looking at the beauty of nature, rather than analyzing each other’s flaws head-on.  The Elder bushes are in full bloom, and I’m eager to collect some of the blossoms to make Elder flower and lemon thyme tea at Lughnasa.  I learned when the kids were little that this was a good time to see fairies, and Elder flower and lemon thyme tea help to thin the veils between the worlds.  Our family has a tradition of drinking the tea on the full moon of Lughnasa and going out to play music and watch for them.  Bob has never seen one.  We’ve often joked that we are of different faiths:  He believes in nothing, and I believe in everything.  That never stopped him from bringing his guitar out into the woods with us, though.

I never considered when my stomach was flat if there might be fairies.  I only learned about them in motherhood, when Saoirse convinced me otherwise, talking about them non-stop when she would toddle up the dirt road beside me, badgering me with questions about them.  The sincerity of her belief made me question my own assumptions about what was real and what wasn’t.  Modern man doesn’t like to believe in anything that cannot be measured, I realized one afternoon in the woods.  It was after that when I began to see the fairies.  

I wondered if this ability to see them was just one of the magical perks of early childhood.  I wondered if, as the girls grew older and more wise to the ways of the world,  they would lose the ability to do it.  I wondered if my own sitings would fade as Saoirse’s and Ula’s maturity set in.  But the opposite happened.  I don’t need Elder flower tea to see them any more.  I can sit outside in the dark in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, even in late fall and winter, and see occasional lights twinkling in the branches of trees.  Most of the time I see nothing.  But some mornings I’ll see three or four.  Even though I am able to see them without herbal assistance, I still like to make the tea for the kids.  They still enjoy drinking it and going out into the woods with Bob and me.  It’s good to have a time when we practice believing all those things that cannot be seen.  

He’s never seen a fairy, but Bob still pulls his knife from his pocket and forges the brush and ticks to cut a handful of blossoms for me.  “Don’t forget to thank the bush!”  I call from the dirt road.  “And ask permission first!  You have to ask permission!”

“What if it tells me ‘no?’”  He calls over his shoulder.  He thinks he’s being funny.

“Then don’t cut it!” I admonish him.  “We can ask the next bush!”  He says nothing more.  A few minutes later he comes back with a bouquet of Elder flowers.

He insists on carrying them home for me, his own cynicism about the world pushed aside.  He doesn’t believe in much.  But he believes in his wife.  And if she believes one should talk to the Elder bushes and look for fairies, then he’ll do that, too.  It is true that he is blind to fairies.  But as I walk beside him and gaze up at him, I realize he’s blind to many other things, too.  He’s blind to my buka buka.  He’s blind to the marks on my skin, the bags beneath my eyes. He is blind to the water weight, the stretch marks, the fine wisps of gray that have begun to appear in my hair.   He is blind in his love for me.  

Having children forced me to surrender my need to maintain a certain appearance.  It taught me to see what cannot be seen, whether it’s the spark of light in the darkest soul, the humor in the most sober moment, or a fairy in a treetop.   It has taught me to have faith, and to make a daily practice of seeing magic in a jaded and angry world.  I would surrender my innie to an outie any day for that exchange.  

But Bob didn’t need to.  He was able to see what couldn’t be seen all along:  the person I’ve always been.