Kate: <tugs at rear end with scowl on face>
Justin: “What’s your problem?”
Kate: “My girdle is chafing.”

<silence>

That’s right, folks. You heard it here first. My girdle. A giant gestational jockstrap.

Before this, I’ve never had sympathy for an inanimate object — but I’ve also never subjected innocent poly-nylon blend to such near-ripping tautness.

It feels good, all things being relative, for about five minutes. Gives me a break from having to cup the heaving mass with both arms like a sixth-grade class runt buckling under the strain of laps with a medicine ball. Then, a spontaneous perimeter breach as a snap gives way with an audible TWANG! between my legs.

And the heckler comes to life inside what’s left of my brain: You’re wearing a GIRDLE. GirdleGirdleGirdle!

Am not, I say to the voice. Shut up. It’s an Intimate Prenatal Support Garment.

Are too, cackles the voice. It’s a GirdleGirdleGirdle! And you’re TORTURING IT. There’s a statute in the Geneva Convention that outlaws what you’re doing to that poor, helpless girdle right now. You’re a heartless despot to girdles everywhere. Everybody stand back — it’s going to BLOW!

This morning I woke up feeling impossibly stretched, like every joint and muscle and inch of overblown-balloon skin is about to stage an illegal wildcat strike. I can’t possibly get any bigger than this. I just can’t.

People tell me I look ‘cute’. But given context, I can see they’re aghast. I would qualify as cute if I had a bag of onesies and a box of breast pads waiting by the front door, ready for imminent labour. But I am only at 28 weeks, with two months of expansion still to come. A Mount Everest of both time and fundal height.

All that lies ahead is pregnancy of grotesque proportions. I know I’m supposed to be positive, and I’m supposed to glow. But my belly throbs with relentless pressure, crawls with itch. I want it to stop. Anything for it to stop.

Then, thoroughly miserable, I trip over this.

Me, a little more than slightly drunk on mai-tais in Hawaii, a day or two before Justin asked me to marry him. This night we went to the resort’s happy hour after baking on the beach all day, and then returned to our gorgeous suite to jump on all the beds and kick it to 70s funk.

I was all bronzed bubbliness. I was so thin. Was I ever so thin? Not appearances-thin but unoccupied-thin. What heaven it would be to inhabit that body right now, now when I can’t tie my own shoes without help.

I am miserable, huge, incapable, hormonal. I am a bottomless pit of complaints. I can’t help it: the only relief I have is for people to understand. I need you to know how this feels, this urgency to be empty again. They spill from me, these complaints, because sympathy is the only relief I can access other than distant birth.

I’m suddenly restless with it, this lust to be empty.

And guilty too, for souring my womb when I should be breathing deeply and sending waves of motherly affection to Alpha and Bravo, sumo-wrestlers dear.

The me in this picture didn’t whine and shuffle through the day. She buttoned up her pants, leapt out of bed in the morning, walked briskly. She must have been pleasant for Justin to spend time with, all ease and lightness and giggles. She had no idea how free she was.

Looking at her now I’d swear she skipped through life. If I met her today I’d use my belly to smush her into the wall like a bug just for provoking me with her perky existence.

Justin: “How are you feeling?”
Kate: “I can’t stop burping, but whenever I do, I feel like I’m going to barf.”
Justin: “I’m sorry I asked.”
Kate: “It’s like my digestive organs are all crammed up into my throat. It’s totally disgusting. Want to see?”

<silence>