When I was eight months pregnant, I had to rub my own feet and fetch my own ginger ale. My loving husband had abandoned the mother of his future child to go on a week-long hike in Scotland, in an effort to get “super-fit” before the baby arrived. While my stomach ballooned, the modest belly he’d nurtured for decades started to deflate. I’d always assumed that men packed on the pounds in solidarity with their pregnant wives. It would make sense—one of you is eating for two and filling the house with their cravings. For me, that meant loading our fridge with so many cream-filled desserts, it resembled a French pâtisserie. But no—he got fit while I got fat. (I know, I know. Pregnancy isn’t “fat”—that’s just how I felt next to his increasingly shredded body.)
Speaking to friends and fellow buggy pushers around the playground, I learned I wasn’t the only one who saw the weight slide off her partner and onto herself as if by some malicious teleportation.
