Does this make me look fat?

"You look great!"

This compliment is almost always closely followed by, "You can hardly tell you're pregnant!"

I hear this all the time, and I know it's meant as a compliment. But it always sounds weird to me -- is "looking pregnant" supposed to be the equivalent of "not looking great"? That seems to be the implication.

Before I got pregnant, I always thought that the pregnant women I knew or saw on the street looked like goddesses. They were bringing new life into the world, they had the special clothes, they were plump and happy about it. Who wouldn't be? I thought. A woman is supposed to gain weight to feed her baby. She's supposed to get the glow and ignore the scale.

I guess this is just another fiction that formed in my head because I don't spend enough time with other people. It seems like, in this country, weight is *always* a concern, and body image *always* tied to looking thin, no matter what the circumstance. I mean, why else tie "looking great" with "hardly looking pregnant"? We don't actually hate the growing baby, just the way she detracts from the idealized image of a woman as thin, athletic, yet still curvy, or whatever it is we're supposed to be.

I know I'm lucky in that I escaped these pressures growing up naturally thin (although, wearing a back brace, I didn't exactly conform to the feminine ideal, either). I never had to worry about dieting, and my mother, thankfully, didn't ever talk about dieting. So, for the most part, I was never indoctrinated. I tend to think of most women I know as pretty attractive, whether fatter or thinner, taller or shorter.

My whole life, mostly I've heard, "you're so thin!" expressed kiddingly or approvingly, but with an undertone of something, I'm not sure what. But I hear it again in "you can hardly tell you're pregnant." To me, it's not a compliment -- I want to celebrate my big, huge belly and the little girl that's growing inside it.