Chapter 5 - fat mom's club

Another unexpected side effect of coming back fatter.. everyone feels compelled to give you their own unsolicited weight gain story. And sometimes, even more awkwardly, their pregnancy stories. There have already been so many tales told to me explaining exactly how my coworkers and customers found themselves becoming obese. But this one today stung extra hard..

In this random coworker's defense, she did walk into the bathroom to find me struggling to smash down my boobs enough to reconnect the clips on my nursing bra. So, regardless of how big I was, it was honestly a fair assumption.

When she entered the bathroom, I was standing in the mirror and losing the fight against my maternity bra. She surveyed the situation and gave me a knowing smile. By the time she was standing beside me to wash her hands, I had made very little progress in containing the weight of my chest.

The older lady again made eye contact, then gave me a friendly chuckle. "Oh I remember those days," she said in a wistful tone. "But I'm telling you, breastfeeding is the way to go!"

I nodded, because.. what else would you do? The woman kept talking, undeterred by my lack of audible response.

"You know, I didn't breastfeed with my first," she continued, "and I came back from maternity leave just as big as you, honey. Couldn't tell my baby had been delivered at all!"

I felt flushed and felt self conscious.. too self conscious to interrupt her monologue.

She went on. "But two years later, when I was suspicious that I was expecting again, I was still every bit as big as you are today. That weight wasn't coming off for nothing! In fact, I had put on a few more, and it all seemed to go straight for my belly now!"

Remembering something, the woman softly laughed. "Oh you should've seen me, waddling into the OBGYN, looking well into my 2nd trimester. When I told the secretary I was there for a pregnancy test, bless her heart, that poor girl looked so confused!"

She was laughing, so I conjured up a gentle laugh myself.

"Let me warn you," she said, her face becoming more serious. "They SAY that when you gain a whole shit ton of weight with your first baby.."

She paused to inspect my frame. "You look like you used to be tiny."

"I was, once," I answered truthfully. There was no way out of this that wouldn't mortify us both.

"They say that when you gain an extreme amount of weight with your first baby, you won't need to gain much for the second pregnancy..."

She turned to look me dead in the eyes, as if she were telling me an urgent secret.

"It's not true! Sure, instead of 65 pounds like my first pregnancy, the second time I only put on 50. Either way, two babies in, I'm damn near double my normal weight. But breastfeeding my second changed all of that!"

I was probably still staring blankly, trying to sort out all of emotions of guilt, shame, arousal, and sympathy. The woman grabbed her own protruding belly and gave it a good-natured shake.

"You couldn't tell it now, of course, but I lost almost all that baby weight eventually! You're never going to be a skinny little thing again, you know that, right? When you put on a ton of weight real fast, your body don't want to let go of it."

"I've noticed that," I said.. again, still not lying. I wasn't like I didn't try to slim down before coming back to work. I joined a gym and let some fraternity guy pinch my rolls, weigh me, and measure my body fat. I squeezed into my biggest workout clothes and tried to ignore the way my whole body jiggled with the slightest movement, inevitability exposing my little paunch by the time I gave up. I hadn't had a baby, but I knew she was right about one thing, I needed to give up on the idea of ever being skinny again.