...everyone who has ever been through one wants to tell you their stories. Which is fine, and cute, and it's a good bonding experience (once the bride/mother-to-be learns to shrug off the well-meaning but completely uninformed advice). But there's just one problem: no wedding story will ever come close to a pregnancy horror story. Your cake might have toppled over, or the best man fainted, or the rings might have been forgotten in a hotel room. Maybe your veil even caught on fire from lighting the unity candle.
But no, none of those even come close to beating ANYTHING close to "oh yes, after 96 hours of excruciating labor my abdomen was sliced open and then ...[insert groteseque details here]." Or almost worse, "I thought for sure that once I was past the first trimester we were good to go, but then I miscarried at 19 weeks with copious bleeding and had to be rushed to the ER. *pause* Wow, you're pretty far along to not be showing even a little bit...are you sure everything's okay?"
News flash: I don't need your help coming up with ways my pregnancy could go wrong. Trust me, my body is coursing with hormones. I have fully considered every possible thing that could go wrong - food poisoning, lack of nourishment, seatbelt trauma in a car accident, having a 19-pound baby, freak genetic incompatibilities that result in our child being born with a full-length beard, and the chance of being picked off by a sniper on the fifth floor of the office building in our local grocery store parking lot.
[I might have woken my husband up in the middle of the night crying about that last one.]
And I've taken the reasonable precautions for them. Prenatal vitamins, a healthy diet, frequent (but not too frequent) exercise, safe driving, and pricing bullet-proof vests long enough to cover a protruding belly (we decided that probably a crib was a better investment of the money, although I sure hope we don't live to regret that decision). And so I've reached the point where there's really nothing I can do about it. We just wait and pray that everything turns out...and we keep my favorite comfort foods stocked for the days when the hormones take over.
So when the next person eyes my still very flat belly and make a comment like "Gee, you don't seem to grown at all...are you sure the baby's all right?", I will look them in the eye and say very, very sweetly:
"No, it was just an elaborate hoax to see how many people noticed after six or seven months. Congratulations on catching on so fast!"
And then I will start working on my list of horror stories to tell the next pregnant woman who comes along.
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