I remembered this morning why I hate being pregnant. Standing in the shower, precariously balanced, trying to contort around my big bulky belly whilst firmly grasping a sharp object sans contact lenses, I remembered: this is why I hate being pregnant. The size. The smell. And the hair. Oh sweet angels of mercy, the hair. I'm not talking about the hair on my head, that glorious, luscious pregnancy perk of thick, beautiful tresses—although lately I've been wondering if this really is a perk or merely a cruel joke. (See? See how beautiful you'd be, how absolutely amazing with all this fabulous hair, if only the rest of your body weren't approximately the size of Oklahoma?)

But no, it's that hair, that hair that grows over everything you can't see below the belly bump, that I'm talking about. The hair that you shave on Saturday night, only to find when you put on a skirt for Sunday morning it's miraculously regrown and you've morphed into a Yeti. Yes. That hair. When I became pregnant with my first and suddenly had hair growing everywhere, my head, my arms, my legs (I even looked in my ears), I suddenly had new sympathy for my dear Italian friends. And an amazing amount of new self-pity for poor, hairy me.

So I shave and I shave and I shave and I shave, because of course, along with this new Yeti-hair, there's approximately eight times as much surface area as usual on my body. I don't understand this. I love the "baby bump;" don't get me wrong, the precious little belly swelling away brings hormonally-induced tears to my eyes at least daily. But why must the rest of me grow so much? Why? Why?? I comprehend the need for my belly to grow; I'm gestating a fetus and it needs room. But why must my face get so fat? And my legs? And my arms? And my butt? And my toes? I'm sure if I could peer inside I'd see all my internal organs, bloated fat and happy, swimming around in layers of cream sauce as they beef away.

As a woman who's been pregnant two times in two years, I've heard all the stories of so-and-so. You know the one, the woman who gained hardly a pound with her pregnancy, then went on to give birth to a beautiful, healthy, ten- or fourteen-pound child. And there went all her pregnancy weight, plus some. She had to buy new clothes when she came home from the hospital because all of her pre-pregnancy clothes were just too big. From behind, her friends gush, "You couldn't even tell she was pregnant!"

Not me. I look like one of those expanding sponges somebody dropped in the sink, then forgot for a few days until not only was it swollen beyond recognition, but the edges are fraying, and is that a spot of mold? From behind, I look like I'm carrying twins—one on each side of my butt. I was convinced this was the case with my daughter, actually, having never done the pregnancy thing before. I turned around to examine my backside in the mirror one day only to discover that it was so big, I had to step away from the mirror to fit it all in view. "If the baby is growing in here," I pointed to my abdomen and demanded of my husband (who majored in Biology and therefore should know everything about anything containing carbon or oxygen, although funnily enough he often disagrees with this assessment), "what on earth is growing back here?" I was convinced another child was gestating in my butt, possibly two children, or even more. I was a medical miracle. I was going to make headlines.

WOMAN GESTATES TWINS IN BACKSIDE! the tabloids would proclaim when I left the hospital. The article would begin: "Doctors were stunned to discover Elrena Evans, 26, of State College, PA was harboring two developing infants in her well-proportioned posterior. 'We have never seen anything like this before,' the doctors commented, having issued a formal apology to Mrs. Evans for giving her grief about weight gain. 'We never dreamed she was having another baby, let alone two! We thought she was just fat.'"

Of course, this was all a fantasy. I had a midwife, not a doctor, and she seemed to take a let-the-body-do-what-it-will stance on the exponential growth of my butt. She seemed to reason that whatever I put on, I'd take off again by nursing. And much as I doubted her, after my daughter was born and I went home with one baby, not three, and a still-ginormous backside, I found out, eventually, she was right.

That's what makes this pregnancy's weight gain so hard. I am zooming right back up to the fattest point of my life, having just come off of the skinniest. I not only lost the "baby weight," I lost the butt weight, the face weight, the leg weight, the toe weight. I dropped right down to an unheard-of new personal low and all without even a nod at dieting (sharing this information, I've since learned, is not a great way to make new friends in your mom's group). But if the pregnancy gods are capricious and vile, the nursing gods were benevolent and kind. It didn't happen overnight like so-and-so, but it did happen, and soon I was borrowing my mother's skinny jeans and parading around with my new svelte body and my frighteningly oversized nursing breasts.

That was the life: sitting on the couch nursing the baby, watching movies and eating cheese pizza. A diet I'd recommend for anyone. Not only was I the skinniest I'd ever been in my life, I was eating more food than I'd ever dreamed I'd let myself. Sure, I'll take seconds! Of course, I'll have dessert! And can you put whipped cream on that full-fat latte?

Not so anymore. I could try and subsist on a steady diet of tuna and alfalfa sprouts while pregnant, except tuna has mercury and sprouts have E. coli, and I would still zoom up to my Godzilla weight. Fat toes, here I come.

But it's okay. And not for any of those smarmy, I'm-creating-a-life! reasons. It's okay because this time around, I know it will come off. And this time around I have a plan. If nursing one baby helps you lose weight, what happens when nursing two? Two little nurslings, one baby and one toddler—I figure I'm going to plunk my butt on the couch, bare my chest, and stand up six months later, skinny. It's going to be a beautiful thing.

So grow away, my darling butt, because you'll get yours when the time comes. Rent those movies, stock up on books, and prepare yourself for nothin' but nursin'.

And oh, by the way, can you pass the cheese pizza?

Elrena Evans holds an MFA in Creative Writing and lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, her one-year-old daughter, her gestating baby, and her butt. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Literary Mama, Time of Singing, Mothering, MotherVerse, and the Random House anthology Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers. Since writing this essay, she has stopped looking at her backside in the mirror.

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