Disparity studies

I started chatting with one of the other pregnant ladies in my yoga class today. There are usually 3-4 of us who rotate in and out of the lunchtime classes. This one particular lady has, until recently, always looked like she was a month ahead of me. Then somewhere over the course of the last week, I expanded to the point where she looked like she was a month behind me. It turns out she is due almost approximately one month before me. She is tiny. She can still do koundinyasana. I cannot do koundinyasana anymore. My body has decided to be a gigantic sponge this week and I feel like I am toting around an extra X number of pounds of water weight in addition to the 30 extra pounds that is strapped to my midsection. Even chaturanga makes me grimace now. I am a water balloon.

Anyhoo, this yoga lady was chatting away in the locker room and told me that she had taken off 2.5 years after her daughter was born. "You know, I'm from Canada and it's important to me to be home with my child," she said. Her tone was one of privileged disdain for us misdirected Americans, who clearly prefer to stick their kids in daycare than to marry someone with a nice job at Nokia who can afford to let his wife stay home fulltime. While they lived in SF. Gag me.

I was irked but since the yoga studio is technically in a spa, I didn't feel like being That Person, the one who disrupts the spa ambiance to give a little smackdown. Lunchboy and I do well for ourselves but not working is not an option for me. I would very much like to have more flexibility than I do, but my company is not what I'd call family friendly when it comes to messing with days/hours. My company still frowns on telecommuting for god's sake. The bean is going to be in daycare after my maternity leave is over and I'm still on the fence in terms of how I feel about that. So I don't enjoy hearing that kind of condescenscion from someone who is lucky enough to have had the option of being job-free after the birth of her firstborn. Then again, I chose to practice at a place filled with women who are clearly not returning to the office after yoga class, so I bit my tongue. Then I toddled off to ABP, where I have been such a regular at the harvest pumpkin soup bar that one of the cashiers knows me by sight. I think this is something I should be embarassed about