Like many of you, I read Big Mama’s regular blog feature Fashion Friday.  She writes about everyday fashion in a way that is entertaining and not pompous.  I read even though I am not even remotely fashionable.  Fashion left me behind about ten years ago when everything switched to stretchy, drapy super-snaggable polyblends and 1970s patterns.  I am hoping that eighteen months from now, when my body has settled into whatever it decides is post-baby normal and I need to finally replace my wardrobe, clothing will once again be tailored, monochrome and 100% cotton.

Fingers crossed.

For now, I am still in the purgatory of maternity clothes.  And I have a few words to say on the subject.

Designers, listen.  I know we’re not friends.  You don’t like me and I don’t like you.  I don’t spend nearly enough on clothes to be your target market, and you make clothes apparently only to pain and insult me.  Your maternity clothes seem designed around skinny women wearing artificial belly bumps rather than real women with real pregnancies.  I am going to charitably assume that you design the clothes you do out of well-meaning ignorance rather than sadistic scorn for heterosexual procreators, so I’m going to help you out with a little advice.

1.  I am pregnant. Let me wear a @#$%^& normal bra. Those square necks and peasant shirts and wide-strapped tanks and spaghetti straps and whatever other absurdity is currently fashionable for the seventeen-year-old figure?  It does not work on a woman whose body is preparing to feed a small hungry human. You do not want to see the face of my rage when I finally find a shirt long enough to cover my belly, only to find that the sleeves are so precariously balanced at the outermost edges of my shoulders that normal underclothing is impossible.

2. Stop sticking elastic in my shirts. Seriously, don’t make me hurt you.  And DO NOT call the elastic  anything remotely related to the word “comfortable.”  It is not comfortable.  It is itchy and it digs.   Even if it doesn’t dig when I buy the shirt, it will in a month or two.  PUT DOWN THE ELASTIC.

3. A pregnant woman’s stomach extends more than two inches below her belly button.  I realize that in your youthful days you may have found a little breeze down there kinda sexy.  I do not find breezes sexy.  I find them drafty.  And I would like to be able to walk down the stairs without everyone below me staring fixedly at the two inches of exposed stretch marks that are feeling a chill because you can’t make a shirt that meets my pants.  And this is not a size issue.  Lane Bryant’s maternity clothes do the same stupid thing.

4. I do not actually want to share my cleavage with the world. They will get enough of an eyeful once I’m nursing.  Until then, kindly give me a neckline that allows me to bend over and pick up my current children without flashing the old man sitting next to me.

5.  Clingy is not sexy. I know, I know.  You think sexy is all about clingy.  Maybe in the artificial belly bump modeling crowd it is.  But until the last month or so before delivery, my pregnant belly jiggles.  Santa has nothing on me.  I would prefer not to be mesmerized by my own hypnotically rippling reflection in store windows as I walk past.  The decorum of a little space between me and the fabric greatly improves my quality of life.

6. Bold patterns on a pregnant woman are the visual equivalent of an air horn. It says “Back up! Coming through!”  While there are times I might be grateful if the crowd would part enough for my wide load to squeeze through, I can take care of that myself.  I can always shout “My water broke!”  Please make me something that could not be seen on the cast of Sex and the City or the upholstery of a 1970s couch.

7. Pre-shrink your fabrics. I cannot count the number of times I have bought an empire-waisted maternity shirt that fit perfectly in the store, only to have it shrink up in the wash, even after following its laundry instructions.  Trying to dress in a rush only to discover that the shirt that fit yesterday now has a seam that runs horizontally mid-nipple  makes me call down curses upon your heads.  Seriously - the way you know Oprah’s whole “law of attraction” nonsense really is nonsense is by the fact that no maternity designers have yet spontaneously combusted from the powerful thoughts of destruction directed towards them by pregnant women.

I am seriously considering spending the last month of this pregnancy wearing only sweatpants and my husband’s XL v-neck undershirts.  Funny thing - his shirts cover my belly, do not itch, do not shrink, do not cling, let me wear normal bras and do not have plunging necklines.

Perhaps someday our gifted designers for women can master the fashion achievements of Hanes and Fruit of the Loom.

And thank God for that.  Thanks to his solid imperturbability, our children have a decent chance of being rational on the subject of spiders.  If any of them become entomologists, I credit Az’s DNA entirely.

To see what I mean, just compare my previous Toddled Dredge post with my new post up at 5 Minutes for Parenting.

We had been dating a few months, I think. It was early enough in our relationship that he still did things he hated just to impress me. We had walked to nearby park and sat on a large, stone, modern art sculpture and read Annie Dillard aloud to each other.

For the record, he dislikes walking (he denies this), modern art, reading aloud, and anything by Annie Dillard. I married him anyway.

It was a breezy day, and I sat there holding the pages still, trying to look fetching. I looked over at this new boyfriend of mine, wide-eyed and infatuated, and at that very moment, a tiny spider, spinnerets working furiously, cast off from his beard, descended a few inches, and let the wind carry it away.

I blinked.

“Do you know a spider just came out of your beard?” I asked.

He did not miss a beat. “Helps keep the rest of the insect population down,” he replied, stroking his beard. Then we went back to our book.

The children are fractious today.  Jealousy, whining, teething, and one disgusting diaper failure have already given my day a drama I could live without.  I would like to believe it can only get better from here, but I’ve been at this too long to be that naive.

While I try to calm the angry natives, you might enjoy this delightful hoax from the BBC.  It was the bright spot of my day so far.

I went to college at a small midwestern Christian liberal arts school.  At the time, it had about 1800 students, and perhaps fewer than fifty of those students were African-American.  The school tried to recruit more minority students, but it was a tough sell for an expensive private school with an overwhelmingly white student body and faculty in the middle of a rural, white area.

One night, the Minority Student Organization held meetings and discussion groups in our dormitory.  Students from the organization came and described the challenges of attending the school and their hopes and suggestions for how things could be improved.  It was a cordial meeting and informative.  At the end there was time for questions and comments.

After a number of people asked intelligent questions, I volunteered that I was always more nervous talking to African-American students than white students, because, being a social bumbler anyways, I was afraid I would do or say something that was accidentally racist.  The student I was speaking to said, “Just talk to us like we’re ordinary people.”

Even at the time, I found that advice unsatisfying, though it took me a while to figure out why.  We are, of course, all ordinary people, but that does not mean that we all communicate the same way.  Different histories inform our conversation.  If, for example, I were with a white male friend, I could affectionately or challengingly call him “Boy” and no one would be the least offended (if he’s old enough, he might even consider it a compliment).  But the history of that word between a white person and a black man carries the ugly baggage of disrespect, hatred and oppression. There aren’t circumstances in which it would be appropriate; it would always be offensive.

What is ordinary to one person is not necessarily ordinary to another.

I was reminded of this today when I read the guest post at Rocks in My Dryer from Jenni of One Thing.  Jenni is mother to twelve children and writes a delightful blog about their life together.  For Rocks in My Dryer she wrote a post about the reactions that mothers of large families get from the people around them.

One of the peculiar diseases of western culture is the insistence that the existence of children must be justified.  Parents of large families receive the brunt of this.  Jenni describes some of the unfair attitudes people have towards her large family.  One of her most poignant statements was her feeling that the difficulties of her pregnancies are denied sympathy from her church folk, because they are her “just desserts” for getting pregnant so many times.

Jenni describes and alludes to several ways that people can be mean-spirited and offensive toward large families.  Given the amount of harassment and hostility large families have to deal with, I can understand how even cluelessness can be upsetting on top of everything else.  But some of the comments she objects to seemed fairly innocent to me, another case of two people having different assumptions about what it means to speak like “ordinary people.”  I have expressed amazement when friends with only two kids have children that look remarkably alike.  It would never occur to me that a family with more children would find that offensive.

For relatively shy people like myself, real life conversation can already feel like walking through a field of land mines.  When it is fraught with possible unwitting offense, I want to avoid conversation altogether.  Jenni’s post on one hand made me feel sympathy and support for moms of large families, but on the other, it made me less likely to engage in the conversations where I could express it.

One of the qualities I admire in Az the Husband is his unconcern with offending people.  While sometimes that presents challenges (and makes him dangerous to quote), it has an important benefit: Az talks to everybody.  He never worries about saying the wrong thing and alienating everyone in the room.  The political correctness that is supposed to teach us all how to talk to one another merely silences me (too many non-intuitive rules to remember).  Az disregards it entirely, speaks freely and makes friends easily.

It’s one of the many ironies of life: being unafraid to offend people may actually make you less offensive.