Today I am 31 weeks pregnant, which means that I have (less than) nine weeks to go before I meet this baby boy. I’ve been wanting to reflect on some of the pros and cons of pregnancy. For this post, I’m going to focus on fashion.
So, as a pregnant woman, there’s the wardrobe issue. And this is an issue that begins (with me, at least) right before I start showing. Right before I start showing, I’m certain that I am showing, and I want to get this show on the road and be obviously pregnant. So I want to wear clothes that announce something like: “It isn’t just potato chips and ice cream! I’m making a human!”
Then I start showing, and my jeans get a bit too tight to be comfortable (read: they don’t really zip without drawing blood). So I have to find something to wear. On the positive side, I’ve always wanted to be one of those women who wears skirts all the time and looks together and cute. On the negative side, I’ve never been one of those women. Whenever I wear a skirt, I tend to feel like I look like I am totally out of place. Nonetheless, I’ve been wearing some skirts. (Often with yoga shorts underneath, because let’s face it, it gets hot in the summer, and my thighs aren’t getting any smaller.) A side benefit to this is that when I wear skirts, my wonderful husband and too-sweet-to-be-real kids tell me how pretty I look.
A downside to pregnancy is that no matter how many advances there have been in maternity clothes, they just really aren’t cute unless you’re willing to spend much more money than I will spend on clothes that I will only wear for a few months. However, this time around, I got a lot of maternity clothes from friends, which added variety and some clothing staples for a very reasonable price (thanks guys!).
An upside to being pregnant is that you can get away with wearing pretty much anything. People are very willing to overlook fashion don’ts when you’re pregnant. I tend to be a walking fashion don’t in my regular life, but I get a lot more conciliatory looks now, and I am perfectly comfortable letting people believe that I am dressing this way solely because I’m pregnant and not because I have the fashion sense of two year old boy.
Another upside? I feel no qualms about raiding Kullervo’s closet. His workout shorts have helped me survive the summer, and I just found out this morning that I can button his jeans below my belly. Nothing is safe!
Overall, I’d say that the pregnancy wardrobe comes out as a win. It’s frustrating that I usually don’t feel cute or comfortable in what I’m wearing, but since people really only focus on the moving parts in the middle and the game of ‘guess the body part’, I’m the only one who really notices.
