I’m not a very tall woman. My son, when I was pregnant with him, decided to build himself a luxury condo. Sometimes, I think he was trying to move to a penthouse suite, the way he climbed my ribs. Mostly, he did a lot of rearranging of my insides, kicking and pushing and trying to make more room. I called him Squiggle Butt, cause he’d stick his butt against my abdomen and squirm when I patted it.

By six months, I was too big to sit at my potter’s wheel. I couldn’t reach around my belly to throw clay anymore. By eight months, I was big as a house and shaped like a torpedo, all the way out to there and then some. I remember walking home on a mild day from the local farmer’s market. It was only seven or eight city blocks, and pre-pregnancy, I’d be home in no time. But there I was, shuffling along–correction… waddling along–slowly down the street, my little bag of fresh fruits swinging jauntily from one arm, my belly proudly pointing the way. It took an absurd amount of time to make it from one end of a block to the other, but I was determined to walk this baby into a healthy delivery, and I made my Saturday Night Live parody sort of way towards home.

And old woman passed me like I was standing still.

I was so pregnant that, by the time I finally walked past her house, she was already on her knees in her front garden, and had planted half of the flowers in her beds already. It took me an hour and a half to make it home.

To all you pregnant mamas out there, I say, “Keep on waddling! Um. Walking.”