Having been sold, once again, on an idea by a telemarketer last week, we two – the telemarketer and I – got down to some serious chatting about the promised photo shoot.

Wednesday, September 29, 1999

Having been sold, once again, on an idea by a telemarketer last week, we two – the telemarketer and I – got down to some serious chatting about the promised photo shoot. When I asked that at least one of the poses be a full-length shot to show my somewhat advanced state of pregnancy, she expressed admiration:

"Not many people want their pictures taken when they look like they just swallowed a pumpkin," the woman said in her unmistakable southern accent.

There are so many ways to describe a pregnant woman. Some tell us we glow, others that we look great. Others, like Bob Riege, stick to the fruit and vegetable theme.

"It’s either pregnancy or you’re trying to smuggle a watermelon in here," he said upon hearing the news last week.

With all the backaches of carrying a baby, one wonders what it is that leads men to develop and maintain such impressive pot bellies. Beer is, of course, the obvious answer, but there must be more to it than that.

P-envy … that would be pregnancy envy … may be at the root of the problem. As more and more men get in touch with their feminine side, the beer-bellied population seems to swell. Are they longing for their share of the nine-month mystery? Thwarted, do they decide they can do it bigger and better, and maintain that apple-like figure for years instead of months?

A wonderful science fiction book once postulated that humanity takes two dramatically different paths in the future.

Half of society lives in huge skyscrapers, dining on synthetic foods that can be made to look and taste like anything a diner craves and changing their appearance with the equivalent of plastic surgery about as often as we change our clothes.

The other half has gone back to nature as much as possible. They live in longhouses in the forests, hunt, recycle and send both boys and girls on a sort of vision-quest when they hit puberty. Like the Indians, the voyage out into the woods alone provides for a transition between being a child and an adult.

However, for all their naturalness, this society births its babies in test-tubes, and assigns three parents to each: either two men and a woman or two women and a man. To keep things equal – and that is the purpose of the whole birthing/childrearing arrangement – the men are given some type of hormone therapy that enables them to breast-feed the baby.

Listen up men, I reckon it’s a not-so-distant-future medical possibility.

After all, as pointed out on King of the Hill in its season premier, sometimes little boys excrete a fluid from their baby-boy breasts for the first few days of life, the result of sloshing around in a sea of female hormones for several months. Who’s to say mature men can’t get the same results – if only for the first year or so of a baby’s life?

Giving men the ability to lactate would certainly be a big step on the road to true equality between the sexes. Question is … Would women be willing to give up their superior position on the whole childbirthing issue and would men be willing to do their fair share of the feeding?

For now, Brady and I settle for attending childbirth classes together, and for a picture choose a pose that shows him holding my basketball-like stomach – symbolically carrying his share of the load.

It’s probably fortunate, for our parents at least, that he vetoed the idea of painting my tummy yellow with a big smiley face across it for the picture, although I’m sure our southern telemarketer friend would have approved.