A Maternity Dress and How I Felt When I Was Pregnant

Winter Cadeau 1

Winter Cadeau 3

Winter Cadeau 2

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Dress: Peasant dress with lace trim
Label: Cadeau
Fiber Content: 100% Cotton
Year purchased: August, 2004.
Purchase price: $20.00
Store: Belly Dance on Damen.
Additional information/Oddities: This is one of the only official maternity dresses I bought during my pregnancy and I bought it because the store was having this absolutely insane sale where all these things on their clearance rack were only $20 apiece. The dress is an XS, which I bought because it fit, but in truth, I would have preferred the small if they had it because my breasts (which grew three cup sizes during my pregnancy) are so prominently displayed that it is practically indecent. It is a great dress for summer.
How I wear it: With a good bra.

I was wearing this dress when a man hit on me at the grocery store when I was seven months pregnant. He got flustered when I pointed this out to him, and I couldn’t blame him because, in this dress, people’s eyes couldn’t help but be fixated on the chest. It was like trying not to stare at the sun. Or a car wreck. This is a great dress because, despite the extra space for a tummy, it works really well even after losing all the baby weight.

I have worn this dress a few times post-partum. And not “I just had a baby” post-partum, but “I have lost all my baby weight and still chose this dress” post-partum. Which I feel is a pretty huge indication of how cool this dress is.

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How I Felt When I Was Pregnant

Everyone else may look at me and think nothing has changed.

Everyone says what I am going through is normal and natural.

But it is too much, too weird, too impossible to even comprehend rationally. I am making placenta. I am creating a human. I am providing a home for a new creature. But I feel lost.

In the film Alien a creature is implanted inside a human body and the creature feeds on its host until it is ready for living on its own, then it violently bursts from the host’s body, leaving behind a bloody mess. Good science fiction. But now it isn’t fiction, it is my future. The difference is that in real life, my body has been constructed to feed the creature even after it tears me apart and my brain has been constructed so that the creature will emotionally tear me apart repeatedly for the rest of my life.

I am clearly not thinking positively. I guess I bought into the stuff that people always tell you about pregnancy: that it is a beautiful time in a woman’s life, that one’s body is fulfilling its biological function. I was unprepared for the fatigue, the nausea, the dizziness, the acne. I didn’t realize that pregnancy would augment my sense of isolation, because while I may have always believed that no one could understand what I was experiencing, that has become painfully true.

I was unprepared for how much I would fear of the future.