Underwear Opus

First of all, I’d like you all to know that me guest posting on Pregnant Chicken should not, in any way, be taken as an indication that I am pregnant. I am NOT pregnant. I am not trying to get pregnant. I am taking pains to avoid pregnancy, like using contraception and not standing downwind of Levi Johnston or Kevin Federline. No pregnancy here, no way, no how.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can go on to say that three years ago I was pregnant with my wonderful, amazing, adorable, and fabulous son. I had an easy pregnancy and for the most part it was a good time, at least until my due date passed me by and I not only saw the month I was supposed to have a baby in come to an end with me still pregnant but also the YEAR I was supposed to have a baby wrapped up with no contractions anywhere in sight. As the New Year dawned with my belly still burgeoning, I crossed “tax accountant” off the list of possible careers for my deduction-unaware off-spring and pulled on one of the two pair of maternity pants that still fit on my giant body and waddled off to scan the internet for techniques to speed my child on his way.

I hated those maternity pants by the end. Hated. I refused to buy expensive maternity clothes so all I had were cheap things from Old Navy that were frayed and strained from near-constant wear in my third trimester. The nasty-ass over-the belly panels on my only pair of workable maternity jeans had threads coming loose from the seams and I lacked the motivation to even try to secure the edges because I was so sure that I was going to have that baby any godforsaken minute now, after which I was going to stage a Pants Burning Ceremony in the middle of the street in front of my house. Little did I know once my son arrived, I would be without even the extra energy necessary to strike a match.

Like many postpartum women I wore my maternity clothes for a little while after pregnancy because my body stubbornly refused to act like Gisele Bundchen’s body and snap back into place like it was made of Silly Putty. I should not have been surprised by this since my body has never resembled Gisele’s body in any way. So I sleep-walked through the first weeks of my son’s life covering my stretch marks and oddly baggy skin with maternity jeans and button-down flannel shirts that could be easily torn asunder to breastfeed. But as soon as I could summon the mental agility to sign my own name on a credit card slip, I headed out to buy some jeans with an actual button and zipper than fit my larger-than-normal ass so that I could get those hateful maternity clothes out of my drawers once and for all.

Fast forward nearly three years to a day last week when I was rummaging through my underwear drawer in search of undies that would work under my outfit for the day. I am on a constant quest to find underwear that fit, don’t ride up, blend nicely under clothes and don’t do the dreaded hip-fat-squish maneuver that leaves me with a triple-bulge effect going on. There was a time, when I was younger and thinner, when I could wear skimpy thong undies without incident but now, thongs bite into my hips and press so deeply into the flesh there that I might need to call in the crew who extricated those poor trapped Chilean miners to come find the sides of my undies. So now I wear bikini-style underwear in the hopes that the wider band across the hip will rest more delicately on the surface.

So on this fateful day, I pulled out a pair of black bikinis from the back corner of the underwear drawer and slipped them on. They were cute! Low rise, with a sexy dip across the front, good coverage on the ass, and elastic that didn’t sink immediately into the flab. Wow! I looked in the mirror and thought these cuties were actually Date Night material, they were so flattering. I wondered, possibly aloud, where I had picked up these gems and checked the label so that I could go online and order more of them.

Oh.

Oh no.

Oh, no, no, nonononono!

They were maternity underwear.

How these black maternity demon underwear escaped the Great Maternity Purge of 2008 is beyond me but there they were. On my body. Fitting beautifully. And I was faced with a terrible dilemma: do I pretend this never happened and return to my quest for hot undies for non-pregnant women and deny that I know that maternity underwear actually look pretty good on my Not Pregnant Self? Or do I order some more, rip out the tags, and live with the shame that my body is so altered by motherhood that I need to perennially shop in the maternity section for my undergarments?

When I got to work, I went to the Old Navy site and went to the page with the maternity undies. They were in stock. In my size. But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t order maternity clothes. It felt…wrong.

Good thing too since those underwear spent the whole day riding so far up into the regions where the sun don’t shine that I had to dab a little A&D on myself to soothe the chafing. (It works, y’all. Don’t mock.) And those underwear are going RIGHT down to the basement where the rest of my maternity clothes are living in permanent storage.

And I’m going to Victoria’s to choke the Secret out nicely fitting underwear out of that bitch so that I can end my underwear quest once and for all.