My Bowl Full of Jelly

Back over the summer, as I thought about the pregnancy unfolding over the months ahead, Christmas seemed sort of like reaching Boylston Street in the Boston Marathon (not that I have run a marathon, nor do I plan to try – particularly not in this condition): the last stretch, finish line in full view. Once Christmas came, the baby's arrival was right around the corner.

I can't believe we're here. Christmas is tomorrow? I still, at 35 weeks, don't believe I'm really pregnant. Seriously, many mornings I wake up and have to tell myself, you're pregnant, and feel my gigantic bump before it registers. I walk past mirrors and think, "Is it really real?" It's the feeling of having a deeply held wish – the thing you wanted above everything else – come true, and I'm still getting used to it.

One thing that would make me even happier, like kid-on-Christmas morning delighted, would be if people would stop telling me how huge I am. Seriously, enough, y'all. That's all I want for Christmas. If I can make it the next five weeks (four if this baby doesn't move down from transverse to vertex soon) without another person opining on my ginormousness, my Christmas wishes will have come true. How, exactly, do people (and by people, I mainly mean my own mother and other older women who feel the need to flash their veteran-mom creds by spewing all manner of old wives tales) tell me I'm huge? Let me count the ways:

-"Wow, you really ARE pregnant!" (Nope, just faking the whole bump and bed rest thing for sympathy!)
-"Oh, you'll NEVER make it to full term!" (Um, thanks a lot – you really know how to comfort a girl who's on bed rest praying every day that her baby gestates long enough.)
-"Are you sure you're not having twins?" (Yeah, I'm pretty sure – last time I looked it was no longer 1850 and a handy thing called an ultrasound had been invented.)
-"Sometimes one twin can hide behind the other...it happened to my friend's friend's mother's cousin." (How would one even respond to this?)
-"You look big for x weeks." (Are you a member of ACOG? And do you have a tape measure or are you so good you can eyeball it?)
-"Oh but you're ALL baby." (To come to this conclusion, you would have to have checked out my ass to see if I've also grown there. Which is just all kinds of wrong.)
-"Are the doctors going to take the baby out early if he keeps growing like this?" (Yeah, because the NICU has been kind of slow.)
-"He's a hearty, healthy boy!" (Are you saying I'm growing a fat kid?)

I'm almost relieved that I'm confined to my house these days, because it had gotten to the point that I couldn't go anywhere without hearing one of these "helpful" unsolicited comments. I'd decided that if another stranger asked me in the elevator when I was due, I was going to look wide-eyed and say, deadpan, "I'm not pregnant." Curse bed rest for denying me that fun!

Seriously, unless you've earned a degree from a top-tier medical school, trained in obstetrics and have personally seen lots of pregnant bumps in a clinical setting (or you're a close girlfriend who I know isn't judging me), please keep your assessment in the same place you keep your political views and your real opinion of your mother-in-law/boss/nosy next-door neighbor.

Even if I don't get this Christmas wish (my mother is coming over tomorrow, after all), I wish you all a Merry Christmas, happy (belated) Hanukkah, enjoyable Festivus, etc. and a 2010 full of good things!

(I am huge, by the way. Truly, I feel about to pop. They're not wrong about that. It's just that I can only hear it from certain people. I'll try to get a good photo to post tomorrow.)