We sit along the walls of the small yoga room. The typical lovely and slighly confused yoga teacher has left the loud music on in the background, but I can still hear her ask everyone to share whether its their first baby and when they are due. At first I don’t find it uncomfortable at all – I’m not exactly shy.
But after the first and second woman share a due date several months ahead of mine, I panic. My bump is by far the biggest and I’m pretty much due later than everyone else in the room.
The whole room seems full of beautiful, perky little round bumps. I look down at my barrel shaped body and begins to cry.
To add to my misery I have terrible pelvic girdle- and back pain, apparently also because my tummy has grown so quickly, and cannot even sit cross-legged. I usually love to challenge myself physically and enjoy yoga but now I barely make it through the class, mostly lying on my side with a mountain of pillows around me. The breathing exercises become my thing.
On the way home, I start thinking how insensitive it was to expose these hormone fuelled, possibly hypersensitive pregnant ladies to this, right? But every non pregnant person I share this with look at me blank face.
Thankfully I have never suffered from a distorted body image or been particularly insecure about my appearance. Why did this affect me so much? Apart from the hormones that turn me into this irrational emotional package. And why is it even a bad thing that my bump is big? Shouldn’t I just be happy and proud that I’m pregnant? My wise partner tells me that surely it would have been worse if the bump didn’t until very late in the pregnancy, this does happen to some. Had I not been pregnant, I would most likely also be thinking in that way.
