Living Large is a monthly column about the strange (at least from the outside looking in) lifestyle of a modern, large family.
Having seven babies has taken its toll on my body.
Now before you roll your eyes and say: “Oh, please, not a lament about your lost figure”, let me stop that eye roll right there because this is not a lament.
From my mom, I inherited a few things. One of them was the disposition of carrying weight around the middle and another was the inclination to find humour in things.
Most times I didn’t have to look too hard to find the humour in the awkward instances when people asked about my pregnancy — when I wasn’t pregnant — because most times it happened in a hilarious way.
Take for example the porter at Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital, where I worked for a brief stint as a communications officer.
She walked up to me one day and when she saw me, her face lit up.
“Oh!” she gushed. “You look so beautiful.”
I beamed.
“You must wear this dress every day!”
Well, it was one of my favourites.
“Then everyone can see how beautiful you look when you’re pregnant!”
Um … (if this was a movie, this would be the part where the record makes the loud scratching sound to stop the soppy, lilting score).
I stood there awkwardly for a few seconds. She was beaming and so happy that I almost lied to spare her feelings, but then I would have needed to produce a baby after a few months so I said: “I’m not pregnant, actually.”
The poor woman was mortified.
Another encounter at the hospital, which was a bit rude, was when one of the volunteers had come to my office to collect paperwork for a small project that she was managing while I was on leave.
She was an older woman, from the generation that didn’t mince words and had no qualms about pointing out the unappealing changes in people’s figures.
“Why are you going on leave?” she asked.
“It’s annual leave,” I replied.
“Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe it had something to do with this.”
She made a casual, floppy-handed gesture at my tummy.
“I’m not pregnant,” I said.
She unabashedly looked me up and down and said: “You should lose weight, darling. You should lose weight.”
I was speechless.
Once my rounded tummy even got me a blessing. I’m not being figurative, pardon the pun, when I say that. I’m not talking about my belly getting me a seat on a full bus or a moms-and-tots parking space or something like that, I mean a literal blessing.
Our family was at a Eucharist celebration. It was still early and everyone was setting up. The presbyter was walking around, accompanying a visiting Italian monk, who spoke no English, and the presbyter was introducing him to everyone. When they got to our family, the monk’s eyes immediately shot to … my tummy.
The monk could barely wait to make the sign of the cross over my belly and started rapidly praying in Italian. When we caught the word “bambino” Handsome Hubby and I finally realised what was going on.
“I’m not pregnant,” I said, gesturing wildly while Handsome Hubby said: “No, no bambino, no bambino.”
The poor presbyter was left with the embarrassing job of translating the mistake before they moved on.
“Maybe, it’s a prophecy,” a Brazilian missionary seminarian quipped laughingly to me after the pair had moved off.
Oddly, the gaffs are usually intended kindly. Like the day after we completed a difficult ramble hike in the mountainous Mphaphuli Nature Reserve in Thohoyandou, Limpopo. Handsome Hubby and I were there as part of a team of chaperones for a youth pilgrimage to the shrine of Blessed Benedict Daswa, South Africa’s first Catholic martyr. Our guide, Chris Mphaphuli, who had known Daswa when he was alive, led the hike, a route which he said was one of the saint’s favourite places to pray.
My overweight self could barely pay attention to the rustic natural beauty of the place because I was huffing and puffing my way up the rocks and crags, trailing at the back of the group, while a very patient Handsome Hubby helped — or hauled — me along.
The next day, during one of our big yellow bus’s pitstops on our drive back to Cape Town, one of the youth approached me and asked: “Auntie, how was the hike?”
“It was beautiful” I replied.
“A lot of the youth are complaining,” he said. “But Auntie is pregnant and Auntie never complained once.”
Ah, sweet boy! How horrible it was to embarrass him by admitting that I was just fat.
My three eldest children; who also took part in the pilgrimage, later informed me that they had been fielding similar questions the whole week. At one point a friend of theirs insisted that they must be wrong about my unpregnancy since I even “walked like a pregnant woman”.
It was true, unfortunately. I was waddling because my ankles were swollen from the long bus ride and my calve and hip muscles were aching from all the hiking. I thought all the walking would make me look less pregnant — but alas.
I sometimes joke that my children are the cause of my protruding tummy — even going as far as to call it my mileage — but truthfully, it has a lot to do with my bad diet and sedentary lifestyle — both of which I am working on. There will be a degree of flabbiness after so many pregnancies but most of my flab is entirely lifestyle-related.
My children, bless them, love my flab. Something about my squishy, floppy belly is a magnet for my children. As soon as I sit down, one of them will fight to sit next to me and either hold, jiggle or gently prod my tummy. They seem to regard it as their own giant stress ball.
Wheaty especially seems to be somewhat in love with it. When we are reunited after brief bursts of absence, like school meetings or such, she runs to me like I’ve been gone for years and will immediately hug and kiss my tummy. At first I thought that maybe it was because she was at exactly the height that when we hug, her face collides with my middle but one night, she showed me that her tummy love was very much intentional.
Wheaty’s sleeptime ritual used to be holding my tummy at bedtime. One night, Mimi, who was breastfeeding, was in one of her moods and was possessively pushing and kicking Wheaty’s hand away. Wheaty would sneak it back again and the cycle repeated until it turned into a fight.
“Wheaty,” I said gently. “Why don’t you just hold daddy’s tummy?”
Wheaty tearfully replied: “But daddy’s tummy is not wobbly.”
Next up: How we deal with FARQs: Frequently asked rude questions.
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