Things that suck, part 1 of what will surely be many

I am not a skinny gal.  Never have been.  I went for a period about 4 years ago where I ate nothing except celery, cottage cheese, peanut butter (occasionally) and water for about 4 months and exercised at least an hour a day.  I gained 5lbs.  No joke.

So now I'm pregnant with a second baby..... which is apparently a miracle, because it seems that plus size maternity clothes basically do not exist.  As of today, there are exactly THREE places from which one can purchase a very, very limited selection of maternity clothes in my size: JCPenney (51 items vs 131 in misses sizes), Motherhood Maternity (96 items of not lingerie/sleepwear/swimwear vs several hundred) and, just barely, Old Navy (only t-shirt material items- all woven items end at size 16 or 18.)  Of the three, only Motherhood sells their items in store as well as online, but not all of them.  And Motherhood, for some reason, thinks a sweaty fat pregnant woman wants to wear shiny charmeuse blouses.  After an exhaustive internet search, the best advice I seem to have found for dealing with this problem is: buy bigger plus size clothes.  Obviously whomever is giving this advice doesn't understand how pregnancy changes your body... my belly is the only part of me getting substantially larger.  So sure, I can buy a larger plus size t-shirt, but it's going to be horrifically too big everywhere except my belly, and possibly the least flattering item of clothing available on earth. 

   What gives, Retail America?  Do you not believe that a woman over a size 16 can become pregnant?  Or do you think that in the event that a plus size woman does miraculously defy all odds and get knocked up (surely by a man who was either blind or drunk, right?) she will not wear clothes during her pregnancy?  Do you see a lot of fat naked pregnant women walking around?  No.

   I realize that my mere existence is offensive.  How dare I be fat and expect to wear clothing?  However, in my unusual occupational line, it's actually frowned upon to show up to work unclothed.  I don't think that my co-workers or superiors would support that, despite the dearth of clothing options available to me.  These manufacturers are sending a message to plus size women: you're not supposed to have kids.  If you were supposed to have kids, you could wear the super cute stuff sold at A Pea in the Pod, GAP, and even Target.

    So to the sizeist jackasses who run the maternity clothing business, I fart in your general direction.  And you will surely smell it, because the only pants you'll sell to me are thin, cheap material that would never hold in my deathly pregnancy gas.