1. “I’m eating for two.” I haven’t had soft cheese, cured meat, coffee, alcohol, or sushi in nine months, so excuse me while I console myself in this Costco sheet cake. Mmmmm…it tastes like shame and regret.

2. “I have a birth plan.” Drugs. My plan is drugs. In fact, can I go ahead and fill a preemptive Rx right now because I am TERRIFIED?! And no, Debbie Downer, the story about your 12-day labor with 72 hours of pushing and 4th degree tearing is not helping. I’d better go have some more shame cake to calm myself down.

3. “Ahem Ahem Ahem.” I’m fake-coughing to drown out my uncontrollable flatulence currently crop-dusting the hallway.

4. “I’m having trouble sleeping.” I haven’t had two consecutive hours of sleep since week 30. While you’re in your cozy bed catching zzzzs, I’m online searching Amazon for home sterilization kits because I’m about ready to gouge out my ovaries so that I never have to do this again. And if my husband so much as whispers a complaint about all of my tossing and turning, I will let the University of Youtube guide me through a vasectomy with kitchen utensils.

5. “We’ve decided on a name.” Maybe you knew a sociopathic stripper with my favorite name, but you’re not allowed say so. Even if I choose to call my child Adolf Crisco Beiber Belieber, you must smile and pretend to like it.

6. “I can’t see my feet.” I can’t see anything below my neck. All of my personal grooming has gone to pot. My body looks like Vietnam circa 1970: the jungle has grown over, the enemy is everywhere, explosions resound in the darkness, people on the home front are staging protests and fleeing to Canada.

7. “Where’s your bathroom?” I urinate so frequently that I’ve considered wearing an adult diaper, but I can’t because my unpredictable GI tract is caught in limbo between brick-and-mortor constipation and rapid-firing-machine-gun diarrhea. What will come out is anyone’s guess. Unveiling the surprise is like playing with one of those dissolvable-capsule-magic-growing-animal toys, only with less childlike wonder and more griping of the toilet as if it were an ejection seat.

8. “Yep, I’m still pregnant.” And I have google, so I’m already aware that spicy food, sex, pineapple, castor oil and nipple stimulation induce labor. But thank you, random old lady in the grocery check-out line, for pantomiming how to tweak your areolae. I may never have sex again. Shudder.

9. “My dreams have been strange lately.” Last night I dreamt that I gave birth to a pocket-sized hotdog baby with flippers, and then forgot him in the Macy’s fitting room. If this is any indication of my future parenting skills, CPS is going to take my newborn upon delivery and put me in a straight jacket.

10. “The doctor says that my bump is the right size.” No, it is not twins. Clearly your only exposure to pregnancy is when Arnold Schwarzenegger stuffed a basketball in his shirt for the movie Junior because otherwise you’d know that pregnant women swell up everywhere. My cankles have retained enough water to put out a California wildfire. The spread doesn’t magically disappear with childbirth, so a month from now, you’d better not mention my postpartum paunch because I. Will. Cut. You.