Size (Evidently) Matters

Lady at Walgreen's: "Oh! Someone's having a baby! How far along are you?"

Me: "Five months."

Her: "Wow! Really? Man, at five months, I was twice your size!"

Me, in my mind: Yay! I feel good!

Literally ten minutes later at a restaurant:

Random acquaintance: "How far along are you?"

Me: "Five months."

Her: "Wow! You're HUGE!! And you still have so far to go!"

Me, in my mind:  I suck so bad.

?

I love the fact that people want to chat with me about my pregnancy. I gladly will talk to you about it all day. I can go on and on about what it feels like to have her moving around in there, what we want the nursery to look like, how great my doctor is, anything. I'm dangerously annoying right now when it comes to this.

But the one thing I don't love doing is defending however much weight I've gained/not gained over and over to people who are usually strangers and therefore, not my doctor.

I know I'm a little over cautious in my dealings with people. It's part of being selectively shy. In social situations, I usually think of 50 things I could say before convincing myself they all make me sound moronic. So I opt to say nothing and end up coming off as cold and disinterested. It's why I've had more than one friend tell me, "I thought you were really bitchy when we first met." It takes them a while to realize that I am bitchy, but not in an intentionally standoffish way.

So because I don't usually say anything to strangers, let alone offer up my thoughts on the size of their bodies, it's always a bit jarring when one does it to me. I'm never quite sure what to say. To the "you're not gaining enough weight" people, my initial reaction is, "Do you want to look in my freezer? Because half-eaten cartons of ice cream don't lie."

When it comes to the "You're HUGE!" people, I want to slap them. No! What I really want to say is, "I'm not sure why you think it's OK to say that to me." Then just see what they do. What could a reasonable response to that possibly be? The only real one is the truth: "I want to make you feel bad about yourself because in some weird way it makes me feel good about myself."

More likely, they'd say something like, "Wow! Those hormones are really amping up your bitchiness!"

And maybe they'd be right. But here's the bottom line. Instead of perpetuating society's brutal obsession with how much weight is too much, what women REALLY should look like and (the worst of the worst) what's "normal,"  why not talk to me about literally anything else?

Give me any baby-related topic, and I will have you so bored within two minutes, all you'll be thinking about is an escape plan, not my waist size.