by Susan Percy

Created on: May 29, 2008

I respect Handicap Parking spaces; I don't park in them because I'm able bodied and have concern for those who aren't...and I don't park in them because it's against the law.

But smoke pours out of my ears everytime I drive into a parking lot and see six spaces right up front that say "Reserved for Expectant Mothers," equating-in my mind at least-pregnancy with handicap.

In that case, I was handicapped by pregnancy three times in my life and didn't even know it. I didn't know because my doctor did NOT tell me to park as close to the store as possible. To the contrary, he told me to take nice long walks as often as possible. Something about how walking helps to control weight and keeps muscles flexible to make delivery of bambino/bambina easier. I took my doctor at his word; he, after all, spent big bucks to hang that obstetrics degree on his office wall. My best guess is that he knew what he was talking about.

It makes me seethe that some parking lot guru, "positioner to the cars", decides to counter what physicians advise all new mommies to be except those with special conditions that require little movement during gestation.

Frankly, the best I ever felt was when I was pregnant. Had to do with those goose egg size yellow pre-natal vitamins I had to take, I guess. Or my youth. I rode horses-just walked my mount; a brisk gallop might have pushed the envelope a bit-until I was six months along, swam laps until a few days before delivery, and took those prescribed walks nearly every day. I was rewarded with mundane deliveries, as that kind of body torture goes, and bounced back quickly, crediting it to the exercise I'd done and the determination not to be a weak sister who needed catering to.

I'm irked when young pregnant women, members of the sex that cries out "hear me roar", squeak they're too weak to walk that extra fifty feet since they're "walking for two". I get cranky at the suggestion that being with child is some kind of affliction that calls for rights to, of all things, preferential parking spaces. Mostly, it's distasteful to see pregnant women actually take those spaces against what I'm sure their doctors advised them as well. Because those ladies know it's nothing but a PR scam; an entitlement they really don't deserve. They don't do it for their health. They do it for the parking space, even if the elderly lady got there first and had to drive up and down five lanes in search of a place to leave her car. They do it because a silly sign with a stork carrying a baby in a diaper says they can.

I wouldn't park in one of those spaces even if I were young again, and expecting. Too much pride in memories of resisting help from others when I didn't need it. Somehow thinking that not accepting it then might set the pattern for later...that walking the extra fifty feet when I was young, and continuing to do it as I grew older, might keep me out of that Handicapped space for a few years more.

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