"You look beautiful"

I have not been great at taking weekly progress pictures, but this is a 32 week picture from my instagram 

My whole life I thought pregnant ladies looked freaky. Almost without exception, I believed every one of them was a puffy, star-bellied-sneech-shaped alien. Obviously they were not the problem – they were goddesses, glowing with miraculous, life-giving glory – but my own fears surrounding pregnancy and labor fueled this belief for roughly 25 years. Then my friend Lexy got pregnant and wrote about teaching her students to say, “You look beautiful,” to those obviously carrying a child. That’s it. Not, “Awww, you look so tired!” or “Wow, you look so big!” or anything except “You look so beautiful.” 

Reading her post was like receiving a Get Out of Jail Free card because, to me, talking to pregnant ladies actually felt like a super awkward jail. My previous conversation strategy was simple: completely avoid talking to all pregnant ladies, at all cost, no matter what. I was sure that any other solution would require an intricate flow chart based on some complicated equation from a calculus/birthing class that I never wanted to take. But now I knew the trick, and it was even simpler than my existing strategy. So for over a year, every time one of my friends got pregnant, whenever I saw her, I told her she was beautiful.

Then, somewhere along the way, I started believing it. I stopped being terrified of pregnant ladies, and I started genuinely seeing beauty in pregnancy. I think the most astounding part of this paradigm shift is how it happened A) so naturally and B) completely by accident. Anyway, I am most grateful that it happened before I got pregnant myself; otherwise this post would be written about my progress in intensive therapy.

britt