The Pregnant Male by Mike Schmutter

One of the first things I learned as a newlywed husband is that, when a woman's stomach starts ballooning up over the course of a few months, it does not mean she's fat. It means she is beautiful. She also may be pregnant. Whereas if her husband's stomach does the same thing, it definitely does not mean that he's beautiful.

Studies have shown that pregnancy in women is one of the leading causes of obesity in men, the other one being an obesity gene that comes from the mother. This means that if your mother was a good cook, then you will need to go out and buy a pair of obesity jeans every once in a while. The only exception is clones, which subsist on the cooking skills of a bunch of science professors, and therefore always keep fairly thin. Although they do tend to look like sheep.

So the best way to have a baby is definitely to grow it at home, although that is very easy for me to say, as a guy. The way I hear it from my wife and some of her friends is that if I got pregnant, the human race would cease to exist within a single generation. I can't help but wonder what they think I'm going to have. But in the meantime, I seem to be gaining weight along with my wife, and her doctor keeps refusing to give me a sonogram. I think she's afraid of what she'll find in there, but I'm not sure why. Based on the tests she keeps running on my wife, I would guess that we are probably having a thirty-pound baby. So I don't think that what I have could be that much scarier.

I am of course kidding. I realize that the baby only weighs about five pounds; slightly more if it's sitting on someone's bladder. The other twenty-something pounds is all chocolate chip cookies. Pregnant women can get cravings for any type of food at any time, so the sensitive pregnant husband should be prepared to drive around the neighborhood at four o'clock in the morning looking for rutabaga, and then finally get home to find that his wife has already gone to the hospital, because childbirth is the other thing that always happens in the middle of the night. And then he's going to have to finish the rutabaga on his own, possibly on the way to the hospital, before it goes bad. But he's not going to complain, because he is a caring and concerned husband who wants his wife to eat vegetables, assuming rutabaga is a vegetable. A really good husband is even willing to eat it along with her, peel and all, if that is her craving.

This is the prime reason that pregnant husbands gain weight. Between all of the woman's cravings, and the fact that many of them have the same nutritional value as road tar, and the doctor telling her that she has to make sure to eat certain things, and that she can't take certain pills but she has to take others, and the advice of a mother and a mother-in-law, both of which have probably been pregnant at some point, and the advice of the father and father in law, both of whom still seem to be pregnant, and the free baby magazines that are sponsored by the food administration and advise pregnant women to eat twice as much carbohydrates as junk food, twice as much protein as carbs, and twice as many fruits and vegetables as protein, and the fact that even though fruits and vegetables are not supposed to make you gain weight, the truth is that if you eat five pounds of squash you're going to look like five pounds of squash, and the fact that the caring and sensitive husband has made up to always eat his meals with his wife, then this husband is going to find himself trying to digest some really long sentences, not to mention meals, and his stomach is also going to become caring and sensitive.

And this is all aside from the government-sponsored food provided by WIC, which is really only supposed to be for people who can't afford to pay for cravings, but is actually given out to anyone who can prove that he or she is pregnant, or under five, or both, in some Hassidic communities. The WIC checks are valid for neither pickles nor ice cream, but may be used to obtain eggs and citrus drinks and chulent beans, all of which make the average pregnant woman sick. It can also be used to get enough milk per week to fill the entire capitol building to a depth of eight feet, although I'm not for a moment suggesting you should. Not without chocolate syrup.

Of course, any amount of food can be countered by a proportionate amount of exercise, which is equal to the weight of the food eaten multiplied by your age. That's why senior citizens don't bother getting pregnant. But the truth is that many couples exercise together, so that they can have some romantic time walking the streets together until the woman decides to romantically sit down to rest, because pregnant women can not pass anything resembling a chair without sitting down and exhaling. It would take the average pregnant woman a little over a week to cross a football stadium. Whereas, to a man, it is only considered exercise if you are out on the actual field under a pile of football players and really hard protection devices and trying to crawl out before the football has to be removed from your chest with a crowbar. Or at least walk for more than one consecutive minute. So no one is losing any weight on these walks, anyway.

The best idea for anyone who considers any of this to be a problem and is willing to admit it, is baby formula. Baby formula is injected with all of the vitamins and minerals a baby needs to be healthy plus an unidentified ingredient that smells really weird all ground up into powder. So the best thing for any pregnant couple to do is stock up on formula, and possibly chocolate syrup. The only other alternative is for the husband to carry his wife around on their "walks" in one of those knapsacks that people use to hold their babies and lunch. That way he gets his exercise, and she gets to sit, and there's even a little pouch on the side for the formula.

Or, to avoid all this, she could just assure him that he's beautiful.