You Are What You Wear

Preggo, for posterity. (Photo by Amy E. Voigt)

Dear clothing manufacturers:

You do know that most pregnant women get bigger in other parts besides their bellies, right?

Respectfully, 

Short Fat Me

Shopping has been my drug of choice for quite some time now, primarily shoes. Smartly designed clothes that are easy to launder and flatter my full figure are a close second. They also are easier to pass off as a necessity. Shoes (and purses and jewelry, oh my) are busting my closet open like an episode of "Hoarders."

Certainly getting new maternity clothes could pass as healthy behavior. I might even get a codependent spending spree out of my mother.

However, shopping for maternity clothes has been nothing but a buzz kill.

Some women buy new clothes in the hopes of masking their pregnancy as long as possible. Maybe their relationships or career objectives otherwise would be thrown into chaos, or maybe they want to hold onto their privacy as long as possible.

Some women refuse to accept that their body parts are going to puff up into wonky, ill-balanced shapes. These women buy Spanx garments well into their second trimester and beyond.

To each her own, but the last thing I wanted to feel like as a pregnant woman was a sausage stuffed into polyester casing. And I was anxious for the beach ball belly to become evident. I'd rather have someone look at me and think, "Oh, she's pregnant" instead of, "Oh, does she really think she can pull off that look with that muffin top?"

In the beginning, I traipsed off to a department store that had faithfully outfitted several family members for years. To my horror, half of the maternity collection was essentially yoga garb, and anything else that might have been suitable for the office was sized in either Small or Medium. Mostly Small.

I haven't been "Small" since grade school. My breasts alone weren't ever going to fit into those tops, never mind a burgeoning tummy. To make matters worse, I already was a "plus-size" gal, dealing with the guilt of not seriously slimming down before conceiving. Pregnancy books had promised me that maternity wear had come a long way in recent years, but the message in the actual stores was clear: Only women who started as a size 2 deserved to have clothes that celebrated motherhood.

I had hoped to find a voluptuous, understanding friend in maternity wear. I instead found a skinny bitch who took advantage of my raging hormones and turned me into a sobbing freak who ran out to her car and promptly ordered a pizza.

Food carried me through my shopping withdrawal for a while. I managed to dress myself in selections from specialty stores that understood short, fat women existed in the world, but let's do the math: Coping with pizza and advancing in pregnancy eventually exacerbated the need to get actual maternity clothes.

I generally do not patronize giant discount stores, but I decided to try the least offensive of them. The maternity section there was the saddest little corner of the world I had ever seen. Four racks of completely unwearable fashions made out of ridiculously uncomfortable fabrics. There were a few pairs of pants that had larger waistbands, but they also had legs long enough for an 8-foot-tall Amazon woman. Another strikeout.

A consignment shop had decent enough clothes, since they once had been worn and then sold by actual women with actual bodies, but again not much in the plus sizes. I did pick up a cute purse, though.

Then I broke down and tried the maternity store in the mall. Big mistake. Their bras were made for the chest of a 10-year-old and the cutely patterned fashions graced sizes reserved for personal trainers. Far in the back was a meager selection of plus-sized garments made from unnatural materials that made me sweaty just looking at them. A few solid-colored basic T-shirts were possibilities, until I looked at the outrageous price tag. There ought to be a special hell for exploiting the budget of a pregnant woman.

I turned to online shopping in desperation, never having had much success with clothes I hadn't been able to try on first. But there were pleasant surprises, even a few tops cute enough to garner compliments. The leggings were a bit on the jodhpurs side, but the outfits got me through the winter.

When spring sprang early in my neck of the woods, I needed to find some dresses. No more pants, please. No more anything that had a waistband. I was pretty big by then and uncomfortable in all sorts of ways, and I was staring to hallucinate that wearing my mu-mu nightgowns to work would be perfectly acceptable.

My salvation was discovered in a national chain that builds its collections for all ages around easy-to-wear, jersey-knit separates. I found trendy, well-shaped, plus-sized dresses in which both my skin and my lungs could breathe. The local store in our area doesn't have a maternity section, but there is one online. A few coupons and an extra-lucky holiday sale later, I looked like a professional, presentable pregnant woman, while I felt like a relaxed, comfortable kid at a slumber party wearing a giant T-shirt as pajamas.

I was finally high again.