I don’t get why some women don’t wear maternity clothes.  It’s not like maternity clothes are just a bunch of different styles of tent dresses, like they used to be.  There are a lot of attractive styles of maternity dresses, tops, and jeans that look just as stylish (if not more so) as the non-maternity clothes everyone else is wearing.

For example, a few years ago a friend’s girlfriend who was pregnant went through her entire pregnancy switching back and forth between two different tank tops with built-in shelf bras.  Now these were tank tops that fit her when she wasn’t pregnant, so as her belly grew she just kept stretching them over it, and they got more and more worn.  It was possibly one of the worst examples of personal hygiene that I’ve ever seen.

My sister-in-law is a little better, but not much.  She just had a baby, and pretty much the entire pregnancy she wore pajama pants and my husband’s brother’s T-shirts.  And then she wouldn’t go out of the house because of how she was dressed.

Whether it’s because of style or because of money, there really isn’t much reason these days not to wear maternity clothes.  As I’ve already mentioned, there are some really fashionable maternity clothes out there — name brands and everything.  You can also get inexpensive maternity clothes at discount and thrift stores and garage sales.

There are also plenty of ways to get clothes even if you don’t have any money at all.  Craigslist has a free section and perfectly good maternity clothes show up there pretty often, since people really don’t get much use out of them before they can’t wear them anymore.  Freecycle is a grassroots community that helps to keep unwanted items out of the landfills, and I see maternity clothes pop up in there all the time.

The point is, there are plenty of ways to prevent from becoming that woman that tries  to squeeze into her old clothes while she’s pregnant, or wears completely unflattering oversized clothes.  So why do so many women insist on doing these two things?

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