It's a cruel irony that mums get punished for doing our bit for the human race. In exchange for propagating the species, we also get stretch marks, saggy bellies and permanent memory loss.

Even worse, now that I’m both married and gainfully employed, I'm finally in a position to go shopping and I've even lost enough weight that I can do it without crying, but wouldn’t you know there's nothing in the shops I like anymore?

It's bad enough that I have to cruise the swankiest malls in the UAE with my two rambunctious boys in a shopping trolley from the grocery store because the double stroller is just too much hassle. It’s bad enough that I have to try on clothes with the door to the change room halfway open most of the time so that I can keep an eye on the same two kids.

But what’s really untenable is that when I went shopping last weekend, it was just about impossible to find a simple pretty blouse that didn't make me look pregnant.

When I finally did find exactly what I was looking for, I was heartbroken to discover the store selling a slip of AED 20 worth of fabric for no less than AED 250, a price so criminal it offended my Puritan sensibilities until I left the store in disgust.

Now if I was still 14 or no bigger than a thigh bone, I’d be able to find lots of reasonably priced things. The fact is that I've accepted that I'm 157 in Dubai years and there’s no reason for me to even bother walking into stores full of clothes for teenagers. My darling friend Cindy summed it up perfectly.

“I don't want to look like mutton dressed up as lamb,” she said after a similar shopping excursion. “I just want to look like pretty mutton.

I want to look as good as mutton can look so that when I go out, people will say ‘hey baby ewe look amazing’.”

Is that so hard?

Laura Fulton