After years of struggling to get pregnant, Lucas and I were overjoyed when we finally learned we were expecting.
He has been incredible throughout my pregnancy, constantly reminding me how beautiful I am and never making me feel insecure about my changing body.
Honestly, I haven’t even gained much weight.
I was naturally petite before pregnancy, and now I simply have a healthy baby bump that my doctor says is perfectly normal.
But my mother-in-law, Brenda, has always been obsessed with appearances.
And ever since I became pregnant, she’d found every opportunity to comment on my body.
I usually ignored her to keep the peace.
I want to describe, before returning to the shower itself, what those months of comments actually felt like to live through, because I think it matters to understanding why my mother eventually reached the breaking point she did. Brenda had a particular gift for delivering her observations in a tone that always sounded, on the surface, like genuine concern, which made them almost impossible to call out directly without appearing oversensitive or ungrateful. At a family dinner during my second trimester, she’d reached over, uninvited, and patted my stomach while remarking to the table at large that I was “really letting things go” for someone who used to be “so disciplined” about her figure. At my own baby registry appointment, which she’d insisted on attending despite my gentle attempts to keep it to just my mother and me, she’d suggested, while I was trying on nursing bras, that I should “get ahead of things now” before the baby weight became “permanent.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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