Mom-to-be Ellie Kemper is finding out quickly that pregnancy makes strangers go a little nutty. Where once the most interaction you’d get is a half-smile or comment on the weather, now there’s touching.
“Now I’m showing and I don’t know what goes through a person’s mind—a stranger’s mind no less—when they think oh yes, your stomach is something that now belongs to me and I can touch it,” the pregnant actress shared on Today Sunday. “It’s actually crazy.”
“In a way, I think it’s a nice reminder of humanity, but then I quickly go back to the idea that you wouldn’t do this if I wasn’t pregnant.”
Ellie, who is pictured below with her The Secret Life of Pets costars, is currently expecting her first child with husband Michael Koman.
Speaking of the belly-touching, the star of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt went on to say that it’s less weird now that she’s showing, but even friends touching her first-trimester stomach weirded her out.
“It was just odd. I’m not a very touchy feely comfortable person so with someone touching me, ‘I’m like ahh personal space violation,'” the 36-year-old joked. “It was like touching my digestion. There was nothing quite there.”
While I can remember far back enough to my pregnancies to empathize with Ellie (the first time my mother-in-law shot a hand out to my gut I nearly died), I’m also guilty of having felt a few bumps. Not of strangers — I seriously don’t understand who does that — but of my friends and sisters-in-law.
Pregnancy is just such a magical thing when you’re not the one in the middle of it! The tautness of an expecting belly is a wonder to behold, and it’s hard not to want to touch just for a second.
To all the pregnant people out there I’d like to remind that it’s not your stomach we’re trying to touch, it’s the baby, but I doubt that’s of any consolation for invading your space!
All I can say is belly-touching is one subject I can see both sides of, and the farther away I am from carrying my own babies the more tempted I find myself to reach out and reminisce for just a moment. Apologies in advance, friends.
What’s your biggest pregnancy pet peeve?
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