Commuting whilst pregnant

I've happily commuted from Hove to London since I started working there three years ago. Whilst many in Brighton view it as something abhorrent to be undertaken only if completely necessary, it's never felt that way to me. That was until I got pregnant.  In all I managed (just about!) to commute for 37 consecutive weeks and I hated every one of those weeks. Here's why...

• Even if you are at the front of the crowd to get on the carriage as it pulls into the station, everyone will still push past you regardless of how big and heavy you are to grab a seat. Why? Because they know you will turf out the person in the priority seat so they are damn well not going to be considerate and spend their journey standing by being polite! 

• You proudly display your "Baby On Board" badge and could be the size of a whale. No one gives a shit on this line. If they give up their seat for you it means they are standing for an hour or more with the stations so far apart and so busy as you cross the Downs. You will have no choice but to take a priority seat from someone, or in my case I adjusted my start and finish time so I was not on the busiest trains in and out of London. 

• You've managed to get on and there's still a seat, but it's the one by the window. Damn! You think the person in the isle seat will move over to make room for you. Not a chance. They will get up and expect you to squeeze your mammoth body between the seat and the table. 

• Brighton buses don't fare any better. There was a lady in the isle priority seat with all her shopping placed next to her. The bus was busy.  I first had to ask her to remove her shopping off the seat. (Just to quickly point out I was now on maternity leave at 38 weeks!) Then instead of moving across or standing up to make room for me to sit down, she asked me to "squeeze past". After 37 weeks of tolerating train commuting I'd had enough of stupid selfish idiots, 

"Squeeze past! There's a full size baby in there, it doesn't squeeze you moron. Breathing-in isn't going to make any bloody difference you know!"

And she still didn't get up to let me get in.

• On the subject of squeezing, when the trains are rammed like cattle carts and you are forced to stand, and then someone on the platform yells, "can you move down please" and looks at you, but you can't move down because the aisle size seems to have copied the Vietnam guerrilla Cu Chi tunnels that it's physically impossible for you! "I'm too big, I don't fit" you yell back! At this point the person in the priority seat who pretended you didn't exist before and that they had not seen you, is glared at by everyone on the platform, so they are forced to relinquish their seat for you.  

• Even when you have managed to get into a seat further inside the carriage (often when a little smaller than the last two months!), if then becomes a challenge getting off as everyone stood in the aisle breathes in to make room for your bump like that's going to help! People are soooooo stupid! 

• Outside Victoria station there are traffic lights that people get frustrated waiting at. May be it's your awareness that you have a little person reliant on your care inside you, may be it's because your bones have begun to loosen from all the 'relaxin' being produced and you can only hobble slowly, but the last thing you are willing to do is dart in front of oncoming buses whilst the lights are green. So invariably, you will have people trying to push you across whilst you are trying to stay on your feet. I lost count at the number of people I wanted to throw in front of those buses! I'm frankly surprised I never did. 

• As well as the commute I found Victoria concourse awful whilst pregnant. Your own sense of protective space hugely increases, both so bump doesn't get knocked and you equally don't get knocked over. Yet despite all the floor signs saying 'Don't be a trolley wally' as well as your obvious pregnancy, it still does not stop people from running directly in front of you with their luggage or banging into you with a backwards 'sorry' thrown at you as they fly past. The number of people I wanted to hit on that concourse over my nine months could've trained me for an Olympic boxing match! 

In fact that was the constant during my commuting time whilst pregnant. I wanted to wallop a lot of people, every day!