different
It’s interesting and strange that I am conspicuously different. Maybe everyone feels that. But people stare at me here. Introductory questions focus on my stomach.
No one can be mean to a pregnant lady. I am instantly read, I think, to be a good person, and a stare quickly becomes a hello. One man takes my plates for me when I’m done eating.
Part of me feels like this is a small gift I can give to this place, to show that a pregnant peer can do this thing, too–can make work, exist away from home, eat the food that’s doled out to us, sleep in a rickety twin bed, and oversocialize.
Steve said that I could rob a bank now and then go in hiding for a couple of months and re-emerge out when the baby’s born. He says I look that different and that I should capitalize on it somehow.
My sister said the same thing about people she met when they were pregnant: when she finally saw them not-pregnant, she could get a better sense of who they were, and their features returned to themselves. Oh, that’s what you really look like.
I see that my face is different since becoming pregnant. My eyes deeper-set, darker underneath, my face more swollen, my nose sort-of swollen, breathing out of my mouth, my skin much paler, my hair thicker. I’m not sure if these people would recognize me in a couple of months.
In the cafeteria when I’m walking by, people make way. They step way back or they scoot their chairs up as close to the dining table as possible, as if I were five feet wide.
I’ve felt less pregnant here, though, than previously in the pregnancy. I try to move like everyone else, as flexibly and as quickly. With a prop in front of my stomach like in the movies, I could seem not-pregnant.
The baby is getting bigger and this is how I know: when it moves, not only do I feel it but I can see it. I watch my stomach move around, become asymmetrical, cone-shaped sometimes and then something pokes up in the upper left quadrant. All this visual shifting. It’s subtle, but sometimes I wonder if anyone else is watching.
