My Lone Maternity Shirt

I know that is probably a really odd title for a post on a blog of a person moving forward with adoption - because really, does a woman adopting need a maternity shirt???  Yeah, I didn't think so either.

A while back, while shopping at a Kohl's department store on my lunch hour, I bought a couple of shirts that were on a sale rack marked down to an incredible price.  As I was in a rush, so I didn't try them both on.  One of them was a beautiful shade of blue and had the gathered look below the breasts. 

You know the kind - the ones that hang loose over your stomach and cleverly reveals any belly flab?  The kind where people wonder if you are pregnant when you wear it?

Well, at the time, we were in the middle of our first IVF cycle and the bloat had set in.  I was looking for a shirt to hide the IVF bloat and it seemed like it would be perfect.  I checked the size and it was a Medium.  Perfect.

Well, as the title of this post has hinted, it was - in fact - a maternity shirt.  I didn't realize this until I was taking the tags off.  For the first few minutes, I was completely embarassed.  How "drunk on Gonal F" does one have to be to mistakenly buy a maternity shirt?

Well, after the redness drained from my face, I determined that I was going to keep it.  After all, this WAS before I found out about the fragmented embryos and our dreams of biological children were still very vivid.  So I tucked that puppy into my closet.  I never wore it for fear that wearing it would jinx our chances of ever getting PG.  But every time I thumbed through my long sleeve shirts looking for something to wear, I touched this beatiful blue blouse and dreamed of the children that would never grow in my belly and the day that I would finally get a chance to wear it.

Well, today I decided that I should rid my closet of this shirt.  My friend Jill is now expecting her first child - a boy - and her husband has lost his job.  I realized that this shirt would provide her with much more use than it would provide me just hanging in my closet.

So today, I gave away my lone maternity shirt.  I don't feel sad about it.  I think that I have accepted the fact that I will never need maternity clothes and giving it away was almost like a cleansing for me.  Will I still look at that spot in my closet reserved for my solitary piece of clothing representing a baby?  Maybe.  But hopefully not every day.