My pregnant bootie

Don't let the subject line fool you, I am not currently pregnant. I am actually now 9 months out since I had the convenient excuse of pregnancy to account for my wide butt and unsatiable appetite. Throughout my life I have been cursed with being hungry all the time, getting full quickly, and then being hungry again within an hour or two. I have also been blessed with an incredible metabolism that probably irritated the hell out of a lot of women who watched me scarf down the cheeseburgers and then parade around in a bikini.

Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't like I had a perfect body or anything, but for someone who didn't exercise, I sure was in good shape. Then I got pregnant and the eating went off the charts. One plate. Two plates. Three plates of food for dinner. Even my husband who is 6'6" couldn't keep up (strangely though, my tiny little mom was able to eat as much as I was in my last weeks of pregnancy though she'll deny it). Alas, my metabolism was not able to keep pace with my appetite and my butt grew right along with my belly. I went from a cute size 4 to happy size 12 or 14 and my collection of underwear bare testament to this adventure.

All the original size smalls look sad and stretched. Then there are barely worn smalls of a different brand that I thought might do the trick. They lasted a week in my first trimester and were retired as utter failures. Then I went through a stage of washing laundry every four days so I could get by on the size mediums I already owned. By the second trimester the joke was on me, my mediums had totally caved in, and I had gone ahead and accepted that I needed a large to fit my bootie and I was alright with it.

The thing is, it never really occurred to me that it was my butt that was so big. I kept telling myself it was my hips widening as part of pregnancy, and no one really told me different (bless their hearts). Until one day during my third trimester we were in the kitchen and someone was trying to get around me and they commented about my big pregnant bootie and I realized, yes, it might be partly my hips widening, and yes, my belly was very large and round (the Big Round as it was lovingly called) but at the end of the day, I had eaten my way into the hugest ass I had ever had the pleasure of sitting on. And then, after the baby was born, I saw a couple photographs of my gigantic ass and I freaked out. I had no idea I had been carrying that much ass around for 40 weeks!

I guess this sort of loops back to an earlier post where I questioned whether ignorance is bliss ... in this case it was. But now, here I sit, 9 months later squeezed back into one of those size smalls that had been retired as a failure, waiting for the marks to show up from where the seams have dug into my doughy waistline and I wonder, should I throw in the towel, head over to the outlets and buy myself some cute mediums, or do I persevere, and torture myself with the smalls until they actually fit?