"You're HUUUUUGE!! When I was at your point I was much smaller than you." If you wouldn't say this to a female when they're not pregnant, DON'T say it when they are pregnant. This comment was from my sister - so tactful of her I know. Plenty of people at work also felt it was okay to come up to me and shriek "oh my god you're enormous" or "you're huge" or "look at the size of you." I was mortified and devastated in equal measure. I am an overweight female which is already upsetting and embarrassing, I used to be a size 8. When pregnant, I didn't feel everyone was being kind, they were using my pregnancy to openly mock my size.
A lot of people at work were nice about my pregnancy and were excited for me but some were thoughtless and rude.
When I was pregnant, I was 34 years old and had actually not talked about children much with my long term boyfriend of 13 years. It had become a slightly awkward topic, like the topic of getting married. I don't know why because we talked about everything else. Not talking about both issues were frustrating and finally, on one of the rare occasions he talked about children, I had a mini stress out about it. He said "if we might have children in the future" - I can't remember the rest of the words around this but those particular words got to me. I snapped back "No we won't though, in the future I'll be too old, I'm already older than I want and I don't want to be any older. So it looks like we're not having children." He suggested we should try and have a child now and that was it. By some luck, I was pregnant very quickly. It wasn't how I imagined the progression to children going, I had hoped he would ask me to marry him when we were younger and I was slim, then we could have had children after that. In fairness, we have never had much money despite working full time. The 2008 recession, student loans and zero family support, did not help. I know we both wanted some stability.
Due to the struggles of getting to more of a place of stability (not the perfect place as that wasn't possible), it was therefore offensive to me the amount of people that would say "You don't have children so you wouldn't understand." I think it's outstandingly stupid to say it to a woman coming through the last potential years of childbearing. This must also be devastating to people that have had miscarriages or can't have children. For me, it wasn't that bad but for all the years I didn't have a child and would have liked one, that sentence grated.
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