Badge of honor...

My boyfriend and I were in line at Starbucks the other day waiting to order coffee (I ran out at home).

"What's that?" he says pointing to the spare tire flesh that has accidentally become exposed above the top of my jeans. 

"My fat." I said

"No, on your fat."  He smiled.  It's a good thing I love him.  "You have a bruise.  Right there." He pointed to an area on my hip.

I looked down, kind of lifting the flab o' meat (as I like to call it) a little so I could see the hip hidden beneath.

Sure enough, it was a bruise.

"Oh."

"How'd you get that?"

"I don't know."  And I just stepped up to order my vanilla latte (and no, I didn't go fat free...)

"Aren't you curious?"

"Nope."

"Doesn't it hurt?"  He poked it.

"OW! It does now."  I poked him back.  Hard. 

What he doesn't realize is that I'm covered in bruises, I just barely notice anymore.  I take a pounding from my kids every day. 

My kids step on me, knock into me and climb all over me.  I'm like one of those mother lions you see on Animal Planet.  I'm just lying down in the grass, hangin' out, surveying the land, and one kid's biting my ear, another is playing with my tail region and the other is tackling me over and over, like he's trying to catch his dinner.  I yawn.

Every day I discover new bruises and have no idea when I got them.  I know they're from my kids, but I can't even remember the incident.

I've even made a bit of a memory game out of it.  I'll see a bruise on my thigh and squeeze my brain trying to recollect how and when I got it by assessing the size, shape and color intensity of the bruise.  "Hmm...what's that?  It looks fresh, so it must have been in the past couple of days.  And it's really dark in the middle - like there was a sharp impact point.   Oh, yeah!  I got stabbed with a tinker toy on Tuesday."  I'm like a CSI crime unit but with dirty hair.

I've had friends say "you can buy makeup to cover that."  But there's no point.  I'll just get something new somewhere else.

Like with a grafittied wall, every time you paint it, some hooligan (yes, I used the word hooligan) comes along and marks it up again.  Maybe my kids are "tagging" me, like a little gang, and they mark me up to show I'm their turf.  Little black and blue warnings to my boyfriend, "Back off! She's ours!"

Besides, I wouldn't cover them up anyway.  After all, if hickies are the badge of being a teenager, these bruises are the badge of being a mom (...or a victim of domestic abuse...but hopefully a mom).

So I'll just deal with my bruises from all of the squeezing and punching and kicking.  After all, when you're a mom, you should learn to roll with the punches...or at least learn how to jump out of the way.