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Beached whale or bitchin' babe?
Turns out pregnant is sexy. Who knew?
By Helene Stapinski
[10/20/99]

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[10/15/99]

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By Carol Hall
[10/14/99]

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Like many women do, I cry when I'm angry. I cried because I didn't like the rules.

By the time I was burgeoning my way through my third trimester, I had learned a few things. I checked out a few other maternity clothing options, including a chain of upscale and overpriced stores that caters to the career woman. There I sank a few hundred dollars into several black separates that kept me looking professional when necessary, which luckily was not often.

I also found more answers in my own closet. I wore a few forgiving dresses for as long as possible. I bought a couple of sleeveless dresses two sizes too big. In retrospect, it is clear that the clothes at the first store were some cut-rate designer's archaic vision of the stay-at-home mom-to-be.

Maybe my problem is that, over-educated and underemployed, I don't fall neatly into a pat category. But how many of us, in our hearts, really do? Why does anyone get to decide? Where are the clothes for the pregnant girl,in the cheeky, provocative, reclaimed sense of the word? I turned to Uma Thurman and Lisa Kudrow, who offered a single sensible solution: big overalls.

Either silly and juvenile or staid and matronly, manufactured maternity clothes reflect our collective lack of imagination, our belief that it is not possible to be simultaneously pregnant and hip. For myself, I cobbled together a maternity costume from my hipster past and my maternal present. I got out of storage the tiny, cropped T-shirts I wore last summer and wore them under my sleeveless dresses; no matter that they no longer reached my bulging navel. The look of snug little sleeves around my same old arms often reassured me when I caught my unfamiliar figure in the mirror. At one glance I looked somewhat frightening, at the next, simply odd.

In a way, I never seemed more mysterious.
salon.com | Oct. 20, 1999

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