It is time for me to recant some of my pre-pregnancy foolishness.
Before all of these shenanigans started, I didn’t see the point of maternity clothes. Why buy a whole new wardrobe you’re only going to wear for five or six months? Especially when you can just buy bigger sizes of your regular clothes? Obviously every pregnant lady before me was a dimwitted automaton, mindlessly gravitating towards maternity-marketing like a moth to a flame.
BOOM. That, my friends, is the sound of karma.
Cut to a montage of me wearing the same three maxi-dresses in a constant rotation for the last week and a half before finally, FINALLY breaking down and admitting that NOTHING FITS GODDAMMIT! and making an emergency trip to the city today to try on some of those previously-godforsaken maternity clothes.
I swear before I started showing, I truly thought I could just buy bigger leggings when the time came, so a few weeks ago I went and tried on leggings two sizes up from the ones I normally wear.
What I didn’t realize was that as rapidly as my waist is expanding, my thighs, calves and butt (the non-existent butt of a 10-year old boy, I might add) are not. So while the waist in these bigger sized leggings was a soft, expansive dreamy heaven, the rest of the fabric pooled around my knees like elephant’s legs and sagged in the back like I was wearing a full diaper.
So I tossed that idea and suffered through tight waistbands for a week or two- every day I would long for the moment I would get off work, walk through my front door and immediately trade my pants for Adam’s pajamas.
This was obviously not a long-term solution, and sure enough over the last week it became unbearable. I was getting deep red indents from the waistband of my leggings and my jeans weren’t staying up because I couldn’t button them anymore and it all became a little ridiculous and that’s how I found myself wandering the aisles of a maternity store today, eating my words.
I wasn’t going to buy denim, because the washes all looked a little janky, but in my travels I spied a rack full of leggings and made a beeline for them.
I headed to the fitting room to try on a pair, and as I pulled that gargantuan unattractive spandex band over my belly I involuntarily exhaled a sigh of pure bliss, “Oh. My. Godddddddd”.
Adam was sitting outside and having heard me rail against those “ugly maternity pants” for the better part of three months, replied, “Are they that bad?”
I couldn’t even formulate a response, I was gone, dreamily swaying back and forth within the roomy confines of my new stretchy forever home. I never want to take them off.
Guys, I am not at all ashamed to admit that I now look like this.
Furthermore, I will happily eat my words (hopefully with a spicy coconut curry sauce and maybe a mango milkshake for dessert?) and admit that I fucking LOVE maternity leggings and I was wrong to ever question that hideous, superfluous spandex band, that band is now my god.
I love it so much that I also got a bella band so I can recreate that roomy sensation while wearing my normal jeans unbuttoned, and again, a revelation! I wish I had these since week five (aka The Bloating). No pinching, no tightness, no hair ties holding it all together, just soft stretchy spandex saving my life.
I am sorry, maternity clothing. I don’t know why I mocked you, perhaps because I didn’t understand all of the good you do in the world. Never again. NEVER. AGAIN.