“Have another bite, you’re eating for two.” “Get some rest. You’re sleeping for two.” Though nutritionists will warn you that a pregnancy diet isn’t just doubling calories, it is true that you are making all sorts of additional accommodations for that precious life growing inside you. Even your heart is pumping 30-50% more blood than normal.
While it’s not necessarily thrilling to create a maternity section in your closet and medicine cabinet, you can’t help but wonder if there is any chance that pregnancy warrants a bit of extra jewelry? Absolutely! In fact, there is a multitude of practical reasons that pregnant women deserve multiple rings.
To be clear, even without those practical reasons — which we are about to list — pregnant women would still deserve multiple rings. The actual birth is called labor, but everything leading up to the delivery is hard work too. Like carrying around the kind of feet-flattening load that you can’t even shed when you sleep.
If you are a supportive partner, this is just another reminder to look for ways to make things easier for the person carrying the baby, even if you can’t physically tag in. So what if that jar of pickles gets reopened, along with that page on halo style engagement rings. Don’t second-guess someone who is enduring the kind of second trimester that would try a saint.
Whatever you do, refrain from saying something like “maybe we should have gotten the original in that size, because it is easier to size down than up” to the woman whose internal organs are being rearranged.
The preconception and postpartum parts of the pregnancy journey can be hard to see, but they can be just as hard to bear. And just as difficult to share. A ring that accompanies a proposal can be a welcome sign of commitment. A symbolic gift during pregnancy can affirm that commitment in a meaningful way as well.
Now that we’ve reminded everybody that pregnant women are pretty much infinitely deserving, here are a few reasons why the ring might be what they want in particular.
When you are considering push presents aka baby baubles aka well-deserved pampering, you want something that doesn’t just alleviate but commemorates. We are definitely not trying to get spa days and memory boxes taken off the list. However, it can be nice to receive something that provides immediate relief and which will make an ongoing contribution — something that can be fancy and functional at a time when those two things have never seemed further apart.
Rings are actually a pretty good choice for this. High heels are a dangerous gamble. Dangly earrings and necklaces seem like a safe bet until you realize that you are about to be in close proximity to a being whose main objective seems to be … grabbing things that dangle.
Of course, you might expect that by the time your offspring is lunging for those hoops, you will have returned to your usual accessories. Maybe thinking about other pregnancy purchases will provide some perspective. There might only be a couple of weeks when your body embraces a particular outfit or enjoys a certain ingredient, but that might be the only thing you wear and eat during that time. So finding something that suits you is totally worth it.
Wedding jewelry is already something that suits you well enough that you expect to wear every day, so why abandon that during the pregnancy? If it seems extravagant to buy formal wear for a dedicated period, consider the bridal outfit that you only wore for a few hours.
And, unlike a bridal outfit, there are going to be other future scenarios that warrant use. A change in altitude or an especially salty meal can cause finger swelling; that’s why your ring size is more of a range than a specific measurement anyway. So it might be worth keeping your pregnancy accessories around. The right pregnancy pillow can be an absolute lifeline before and after delivery, but you might find that it gives you better sleep even after night nursing has become a distant memory.
Just as that supportive pregnancy prop might win a place among the shams and throw pillows in your bedroom set, the right pregnancy ring might become a foundational element in an interchangeable wedding ring set — something that is becoming more and more popular anyway.
If you’d like to make the ring more explicitly tied to the pregnancy, you can incorporate a birthstone or an engraving. But even when you are rotating through a ring set, it’s unlikely that you are going to forget the occasion of a pregnancy ring anytime soon. It might not be a snug fit, but even that is a reminder of the heroic lengths your body went to accommodate your baby. So if you want to keep it as a memento, or spend a bit of extra money to resize it to fit back into your rotation, you absolutely deserve it.
