Mom-to-Be Expected More From Her Colleagues

So, this guy at the office asked me when the baby was due, and I told him the end of May, which at the time was 10 weeks away.

“The end of May?” He was surprised. “You’re going to be huge. “

I answered him gently, considering what he deserved, but he caught my meaning.

“I didn’t think I was being rude,” he said, as if I was out of line.

Being a mom and having a strong drive to nurture, I changed the subject so he wouldn’t have to stand there in the crowded elevator and squirm with guilt.

Then there was the fellow who eyed my belly and offered: “Any day now, huh?” Three more months, I told him. Close.

What is it about pregnancy that makes people think it is appropriate to volunteer all manner of comments about one’s size and shape?

No subject is off limits. Complete strangers feel compelled to remark on my diet, my clothing, the amount and kind of exercise I get, even the way I sit.

A friend at the office put her arm around me and said warmly: “What are you doing in high heels? You look like you can hardly walk.”

My how-to-be-pregnant book warned me about this phenomenon--that people act as if pregnancy is an open invitation to cast tact and sensitivity to the winds. But I didn’t believe that any of the educated, enlightened professionals I work with would be such dunderheads.

I asked around. It happens to everyone.

“My favorite,” said one mom, “was ‘Haven’t you had that baby yet? ‘ As if you’re offending people by appearing in their field of vision. Or as if you’re inconveniencing them by being pregnant.”

Said another, who was due in five weeks: “Somebody asked me just yesterday when the baby was due and said, ‘Looks like at about lunchtime!’

“Charming.”

Even dads get it. One father recalls a cafeteria cashier blurting: “You’re too old to be a new father.”

One woman at work looks me up and down and just laughs. “You are really looking pregnant,” she says with some frequency. As if there is something odd about a pregnant person looking pregnant. As if that might have changed since the other 17 times she made the same remark.

Another watched me walk past her department and burst into giggles. “What’s funny?” I asked. “Oh,” she bubbled, “you’re just so cute.” Like a duck waddling by, she meant.

“You’ve been pregnant for about two years now,” said a male co-worker. “When is that baby due?” I started to walk away without replying, but he wasn’t done. “Is that really a baby, or do you have a pillow under there?”

What a wit.

My sensitive brother, whom I hadn’t seen in several months, asked: “So, are you as big as a cow?”

Last pregnancy, I got into an elevator with someone whose name I knew, but that was the extent of our acquaintance.

“How much weight have you gained?” she opened.

In a restroom, a woman whose name I didn’t know (and who had never before acknowledged my existence) volunteered: “Whoa, you look like you’re about to pop.”

“Two more months,” I chirped.

“Mm,” she said, frowning and shaking her head.

And you, I wanted to reply, are rude. But two months from now, I won’t be pregnant, and you will still be rude.

I didn’t say it, of course. That would have been tactless and insensitive.

But there was one stranger in an elevator--a new parent himself, it turned out--who did say just the right thing.

“When’s your baby due?” he asked.

“Six more weeks,” I told him.

“Congratulations,” he said with a big smile.

Thanks! I needed that.