My Body Is No Longer My Own

I'm not stupid, so I realized that pregnancy was going to change and mark my body pretty drastically. I expected the thickening of the waist and the breasts heading south, but I was in no way prepared for all of the changes!

As I sit in my rocking chair, I can see my reflection in our balcony's sliding glass door. I look like a different person. I look like my mother.

My once round breasts are now much longer and pointier, and rather than standing at attention and facing straight ahead as they previously did, they now point slightly left and right and down. Which makes sense, when you realize in a few months a baby's mouth will be at about that height and orientation.

The nipples have gotten twice as large and turned brown (they were once small and pink) and rather than looking like little, proud suction cups, they look like the little mountain peaks--the actual nipples barely distinguishable from the aereola. And the leaking! I thought that would happen later in pregnancy, but sometime in the fifth month I started noticing tiny drops of a clear-to-milky fluid appearing occasionally. Colostrum, the precursor to milk and what your body secretes for a few days after the birth to bulk up your baby and sooth their newly functioning sensitive stomach.

My breasts now rest on my ever-expanding stomach. As they sagged, and my stomach started swelling, they met somewhere in the middle. It's a distinctly disconcerting feeling. 

Also, my stomach is NOTHING like I had expected a pregnant belly to be. It isn't soft at all, but rather pretty firm and jiggle-less. I can jump up and down and my breasts and hip flab will jump along in a strange syncopation, but my belly will only move grudgingly. It isn't perfectly round, but rather more like a watermelon turned on one end. From the front, if I'm not wearing a tight shirt, you almost can't tell I'm pregnant because my waist still goes in under my ribcage and flares out for my hips...from the side it is all too obvious. My stomach sticks out, very proud, and my now-swayed lower back tucks in to emphasize it. Oh yeah, and my butt looks like another pregnant belly behind me.

My arms and legs haven't gained much weight, and I'm pretty sure I lost weight in my upper arms (which were starting to get a little too drumstick-like before the pregnancy). It's almost like my body started redistributing unneeded fat to my stomach from other parts.

And we're only 6 months along! I can't imagine what I will look like in three more months.