Maternity Clothes, Gotta Hate 'Em!
By Amanda Sykora

Searching... searching... searching... I KNOW I own something that will fit over this big belly. I KNOW I do!! But where is it?!

Pulling out piece after piece of clothing from my closet, I finally pull out a dress that I am SURE will fit. Throwing it on the bed and wading through the piles of size 8/medium shorts and shirts, I quietly mumble... "This had better fit."

Unbuttoning the dress and slipping it on past my feet, versus my head, I suddenly realize there is NO WAY IN HELL it is going past my stomach AKA big belly AKA BABY

"Why me?"

As someone who has never owned many brand name clothes or anything truly expensive, this shouldn't bother me right? Well, although I may not own 'great' pieces of non-maternity wear, I do value how I look and love all of my clothes. Being pregnant with a huge tummy just was a little depressing when it came to getting dressed every morning.

By the time I was 2 1/2 months pregnant, even though it was my FIRST pregnancy, I was wearing maternity clothes. When I found out I was pregnant I had every intention to not gain more than 20 pounds and to wear MY clothes until I was at least 6 months along. Boy was I fooled!! When my belly began to grow and grow (and grow and grow and grow...) I realized pretty quick that I was no longer fitting into my size 8's for at least another 8 to 9 months. (Okay, so let's try a full 12 months... sigh...)

On to the stores to buy maternity clothes. A great excuse to buy MORE clothing! What a wonderful idea!! Wrong again...

Do clothing manufacturers really think that pregnant women are 70 or 80 years old? The last time I heard about a woman this age being pregnant was either in a fairy tale or in the Guiness Book of World Records. Pregnant women are TWENTY or THIRTY or FORTY. Not 3 or 4 times that number!!

Every rack that I visited in every store, had these huge looking flowery printed shirts and rather ugly colored shorts to match. Why? Why do the stores torture us like this? Being pregnant is hard enough on the body. Why do the clothes need to make you feel EVEN LESS of a person?!

Eventually I had to make a purchase. I could not go on wearing tight jeans and tight shirts. I had to find SOMETHING to wear that was 1. comfortable, 2. inexpensive (afterall, you are only pregnant for 9 months!!) and 3. NOT UGLY! Number 1, comfortable, I could find. But trying to find Number 2 and 3, along with Number 1, well... that was a joke.

I settled on a few shirts that my belly would grow into. HA! I would never fill out this shirt. It's too big! Wrong, yet again. These shorts? HA! My butt will NEVER be THAT big! Was pregnancy not only making my stomach bigger but my brain smaller?! I kept guessing very, very wrong.

Searching in many stores for maternity clothes I found a few stores were more helpful than others. Target carried a decent collection at not too bad a price. The shirts were cute, and the overalls were too. But, warning, the overalls DID NOT fit all summer. My tummy got tooooooooo big!

Motherhood is another great store. There is not one locally for me, so I travelled to one in another city. It was well worth it. They carried a great selection of jeans, shirts, shorts, etc. The prices are great and the fabrics are NOT all funky.

Even more depressing, was the day that I woke up (granted, I was in LATE pregnancy) and I couldn't fit into any maternity clothes! No kidding! My 20 pound maximum had turned into 30.... eeerrr, we'll just call it 30 something... And my butt had outgrown too many things that fit just the day before. I was forced to wear a dress that I purchased at a yard sale (yet another great place to find maternity clothing!!) that I swore I wouldn't wear very often. It was kind of funky. Small flowers, and it was a LARGE! GASP!!! I never will wear a large! So for about a week, I wore this same dress, hoping not to sweat too much because I didn't want to be too smelly! And even wore this dress the day I went into labor with my son. Yes, there really is an ending to pregnancy.... Thank goodness for that. Because if there's anything that drives a pregnant woman crazy, it's maternity clothes.

Amanda Sykora is a full time mother to two boys, part time writer of many subjects, and all the time webmaster of HerDailyDose.com. Visit http://www.herdailydose.com for more articles written by her.