I sincerely hope everyone had a great holiday of their choice. I spent the weekend cooking and unsuccessfully entertaining a whining baby -- I'm starting to notice a theme here.
My baby looked cute in an appropriately pastel dress, of course, and I looked like someone who has not bought any new clothes in two years.
I didn't really buy maternity clothes, because I didn't gain any weight, because my body has been ready to carry and birth a baby since 7th grade. My petite younger sister didn't have hips until she got pregnant; if my hips got any wider I probably wouldn't be allowed on airplanes.
I am one of those women that waits her entire pregnancy to get a cute pregnant belly, who thinks she's going to “pop” any day now, and before she knows it she's in labor and still just looks like she enjoyed burrito Wednesday at her favorite gross Mexican food place (which in my case was actually true). If you would have placed a friendly hand on my belly without asking permission, as is your right to do to any pregnant stranger, you might have been shocked to find I was attempting to steal a large, under-baked bagel under my blouse. Relax, that's just what motherhood feels like. Soak it in.
Even so, the combination of a sour candy diet and no exercise for nine months left my body with plenty of flab and rolls of skin that I don't remember being there before. I won't complain about my new boobs, because I enjoyed them enough while I had them. Even in high school I knew they wouldn't last, and I wore dresses that were cut too low, I unbuttoned one too many buttons on my shirts. It was fun.
My old clothes all fit, but I feel very different in them. My young person clothes look cheap, and my quirky thrift store clothes make me look old and deranged.
I look like a mom, I bemoan to myself out loud when I catch my reflection walking up to a store window, All my jeans look like mom jeans, and not the millennial, Coachella kind.
“You are a mom,” my husband says to me in that way that makes me so mad because he is smirking at me and making me feel ridiculous. It's not what he says, it's how he says it, if that makes sense.