Does My Bump Look Big in This?

Vanity is a hard habit to break. Sometimes, even now, I walk into a party and, for the few moments before I recollect the futility of the exercise, find myself trying to hold my tummy in. Third trimester pregnancy, when the cute bump morphs into a bulge that enters the room before you do, means leaving your vanity at the door.

Forget changing from blonde to brunette. Forget losing or gaining weight. Becoming pregnant - and then becoming more and more pregnant - gives you a rare insight into how it feels to have an entirely different image. It is a little like being part of a third sex, and it changes the responses you get from both men and women.

For one thing, you certainly get plenty of attention. Most women, I have discovered, adore a pregnant woman: they stare at you, beam at you, hold doors open for you, tell you you look great when you know full well that you look like a madwoman with a Winona-sized shoplifting haul up her jumper.

Like a tigress who has lost her teeth, a pregnant woman is rendered sweet and harmless. It is a liberating experience: nothing breaks down the barricades of female competitiveness like a bump. Suddenly, your body is neutralized. A pregnant cleavage is a difficult thing to keep under wraps, but for once this doesn't matter, because there is no need to hide. Under normal circumstances, flaunting acres of cleavage would win you male attention but female contempt. Once pregnant, however, no hackles are raised, and you can dress sexy without anyone thinking that you are actually trying to look it.

Icy glares are not entirely a thing of the past, unfortunately. Oddly, it is other pregnant women who can be judgmental. Perhaps because they get so used to feeling special - I have never been so fussed over in my life - pregnant women can become competitive or hostile in each other's presence. Earlier this month, on holiday in 80C heat, I wore a non-maternity but larger-sized denim skirt that sits below the bump, with a fitted pink T-shirt. Over breakfast, another pregnant woman in dungarees glared at my two inches of bare bump with a contempt that would have put a less hungry woman off her muffins. I have no truck with this: when I've got a tan, nobody is going to stop me flaunting it.

Yet belonging to the tribe of the Pregnant Lady does change your behavior in myriad ways. I have started traveling on the bottom deck of the bus - previously understood to be strictly for old people - the better to secure myself a seat, having discovered that on the top deck, passengers take the view that if you are fit enough to get up those stairs you can jolly well stand up. Moreover, having long considered yoga to be an irritating and pretentious way to exercise, I have listened to enough ominous pronouncements by women who insisted that pregnancy yoga "got them through it" to have me frantically signing up. So, twice a week, I now find myself posing, imagining myself graceful as Christy Turlington, when in fact I look like a plump five year old in her first tutu.

I suspect that one of the reasons pregnant women love yoga is that you can wear drawstring trousers and baggy sweatshirts, and feel elegant just by standing up straight. And elegance, I have discovered, is almost impossible to achieve while pregnant. Elegance is linear, not bumpy. But with this limitation in mind, I have found there to be a surprising amount of leeway available to dressing the bump up or down. You can look flamboyant or sweet, or even sporty. And like any body shape, it can be manipulated by what you wear. In a black jumper and black trousers, everyone I meet tells me the bump is tiny, which I can assure you it most certainly is not. In my bright-red, kimono-print silk dress, people look at me in sympathetic horror when I tell them the baby's not due till February.

As I enter the home stretch, my maternity-wear shopping has still not moved out of first gear and I cling limpet-like to the ever decreasing slice of my regular wardrobe into which I can still squeeze. I suspect this stems from an instinct to subvert the orthodoxies of maternity wear, as represented by the scary dungarees lady. And the fact is, there is so much else to shop for. Faced with a choice between buying ever larger garments or clothes so tiny they make your heart melt, there is little contest. Even if I give up on chic maternity wear, this is going to be one well-dressed baby.