the pregnant waddle

I am not normally so fixated on pregnancy related stuff, but it is bound to happen when you haven't seen your feet or been able to roll over in bed with any ease for the last 4 months ...

But lets take a look at the pregnant waddle, shall we? Many moms will tell you that pregnancy prepares you for motherhood just about as well as anything can. For example:

• You have people who touch your stomach, no, they don't just touch your stomach, they hold it and rub it. Helloooo, awkward! But it prepares you for the fact that for the next several years, if not the rest of your life, you have no personal space. That "bubble" of you-ness is officially gone. You are no longer you, no longer the property of you. You are public property, at best.



• You can't sleep for more than an hour at a time without waking up to pee. You won't have to pee every hour for the next 18+ years, but a full REM cycle is a luxury you will briefly get to dream about anyway whether its the crying baby keeping you up, or worrying about your teenager making sleep an impossibility.



• The embarrassments of pregnancy prep you for the embarrassments of the toddler years and beyond. If you can handle the gas, the hemorrhoids (which I would like it noted, I have not had), the wetting yourself, and the whole labor and delivery process where your girly bits are distorted and out on display like a buffet ... you can totally handle the moment your 4 year old asks you (in their best outdoors voice) why that lady in the grocery store line behind you is so fat.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Humiliation, pain, lack of sleep, its all part and parcel to prep you for the rest of your glorious wonderful life of parenthood.

But the waddle? Really, why must we suffer this indignity? I have to feel like a whale, but move like a duck? I get the medical logic, I get that it is a physical process, yadda yadda, blah blah blah. Sooo not the point! My husband assures me that I do not waddle, but really, the poor guy is trying to survive these last few days with his limbs still in place, so in all fairness I realize he is not a reliable source of information. But I have seen the waddle, if not on myself, on countless of others and it just seems a touch cruel on top of everything else that you have to list like a ship while you walk.

But I realized something the other day that brought a smile to my face, and therefore is a silver lining in my book: you know the really "cool" guys with their sagging pants? The ones who have either really baggy pants or (the even less logical IMO) "skinny" jeans sagged down past their butt cheeks? Yup, those guys in all their infinite coolness and stylish sensibility -- they have to waddle in order to move/stay dressed. Seriously, watch one of them move sometime ... saggy pants boys have the pregnant waddle! Just like the prego must accommodate the ever lowering head of her unborn and walk with a slightly wider gate, these dudes have to keep their pants in place in much the same way.

So the next time you see someone so gangsta and totally faboosh they have to show their boxers off to the world, have a small silver-lining giggle at their expense on behalf of all the miserably waddling women due to pop any second!