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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
During my pregnancy, strangers constantly told me that I was too small to be healthy -- even suggesting my baby might be abnormal. Who said expectant mothers have to look like fertility goddesses?
May 5, 2004 | Five months pregnant and gummy with thirst, I walked into a corner store in my downtown Toronto neighborhood to buy a drink. The clerk gave my body the once-over and asked when I was due. I told her our unusual due date -- Christmas Day -- and she frowned. "No, no. You're wrong, or else you're going to have a preemie! You're too small!"
Seething silently, I took my juice and stormed out, but she'd gotten to me: I pictured an elfin baby floating around in my inadequate belly, refusing to be born.
I'm 6 feet tall, and at my thinnest I weigh around 145 pounds. Five months into my pregnancy, I had hit only 150 and could still comfortably wear my size 8 clothes. When I ranted about the cashier to my midwife, she told me to relax; the baby and I were both fine. My boyfriend, the baby's father, would listen to my tales of skinny pregger harassment and laugh, offering the useful advice, "Be flattered. Ignore it."
A few days after the preemie incident, I ran into a colleague on the street. She was pregnant herself, her belly tented beneath her fiancé's huge T-shirt. "I see you're wearing yoga pants," she said. "I used to wear yoga pants." She was on her way to McDonald's, she told me, adding: "I guess you don't ever go to McDonald's."
Even though I got bigger, the comments became more annoying. At seven months, a cabdriver posed the old due-date question. I told him and he suggested I check with a doctor to see that the baby was "normal."
Mine was, as a friend put it, "a sitcom pregnancy." The orb blocking my toes did have a certain fake strap-on quality to it. In the eighth month, I still looked like me, except for the comical globe smack in the center of my frame.
I seemed to have good timing: Thin expectant mothers are in fashion these days. Us Weekly and its magazine ilk regularly gawk at the pregnancy "bumps" of the stars, but, unlike Reese's or Gwyneth's, my skinny pregnancy wasn't exactly fabulous. Fielding invasive comments every few days left me feeling isolated and anxious; a failure at motherhood -- full bodied, pull-the-child-to-the-heaving-bosom, overflowing motherhood -- before it had even begun. The world seemed to expect my own body to disappear and be replaced by Mother Hubbard's. To me, the comments meant the same thing: You don't look like a mother. Real mothers require hips to push out the progeny and breasts to feed them. And I wanted that goddess look; gangly and flat-chested my whole life, I dug the idea of being a harbinger of plenty and fruitfulness.
I wasn't unhealthy, or battling an eating disorder: I simply had no appetite. During my first trimester, the sight and smell of most foods caused my insides to fill up in protest; I walked around for nine months with the sensation of having recently swallowed several cups of seawater. Textures repulsed me. First I rejected slimy things, like cooked spinach and tofu, then crisp things, like lettuce and bread. I was left with protein shakes, ice cream and fruit. As I entered my second trimester, my appetite gradually returned in a new, truncated form, and I continued to exercise regularly, walking on the treadmill at the gym or going for geriatric-paced jogs three to four times a week. By the ninth month, I had put on more than 25 pounds, nearing 175. Though my face was unnaturally gaunt from the nausea, in celebrity terms and according to the numbers, I wasn't even very thin. So why was I irking the cabdriver, the dental hygienist and the damn juice lady?
