Pregnancy Hormones Make Me Crazy or Why I Shouldn’t be Allowed in Public

So, I’m trying something new by writing some personal stuff. We’ll see how it goes. If no one reads/comments, or if comments are mean, I might change my mind! I figured Wednesday would be a good day for it; What’s on my Mind Wednesday or what have you. 🙂

Now, I am normally totally non-confrontational and take a “kill ’em with kindness” approach. However, that pregnancy “glow” you see is actually rage simmering under the surface of my skin. I just don’t do pregnancy well and I’m surprised my husband puts up with me, LOL.

When I’m driving, I stay in the right lane with my cruise control on for the most part. I stay out of people’s way and just shake my head when the person who nearly ran me down ends up beside me at a stoplight 10 minutes later. I’m always telling my husband not to get worked up about traffic or idiot drivers because all it will do is raise his blood pressure and send him to an early grave!

Yet, when pregnant, I find myself thinking “OMG! I’m braking…up…hill. Go already! EAUUUGGHHH!” People who can’t pick a speed and mess up my cruise control/gas mileage make me want to tear my hair out. When someone backed out of a parking spot without looking and nearly hit us, I wanted to go beat on the hood of their car and ask them if they were blind or just stupid.

At the grocery store, I will wait patiently for someone to move out of the way, saying “excuse me” and/or pretending to look at my shopping list until they are finished. While pregnant, I imagine ramming them in the ankles with my cart and telling them that all the (corn, tuna, pasta) is the same so just pick one already!!

A few weeks ago, I took the kids to Chick-Fil-A for lunch. My son always wants to be held when it’s inconvenient, so I was holding him while I struggled to pull out a stack of high chairs, get one off the top, then put the stack away. I turned around for maybe 10 seconds to walk 8 feet to the counter (to get our food) and back, and someone had taken the *^%^& high chair! Normally, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt, but they had to have seen me struggling with the thing. I shot mental daggers into the backs of their heads and then wrestled another high chair out so we could sit down.

After we ate, I let the kids play in the playground a bit. This was a different restaurant than we usually go to. Our usual Chick-Fil-A has a little area for toddlers with a plastic tree house thing with slide etc. This one didn’t. All it had was what almost looked like a plastic box with a round opening (just big enough for one kid to climb through and sit in.) My son (two, and tiny) was halfway through it when a boy a few years older came into the play area. He immediately shoved himself into the “box,” knocking my son down in the process.

I brushed him off, and he went with my daughter to climb the bigger play tower. He is really a little too small for it, but can climb up with his sister’s help. The other boy came tearing out of the “box,” shoving my kids aside. When he made it through, he proceeded to climb up the slide while other kids were trying to go down. My kids were still trying to make it up (staying to one side because they’re polite like that) and the darn kid came rip roaring through again, stepping on my son this time! Now this whole time, the boy’s mother was sitting there. At least two or three times she said “watch out for the little ones,” but hello? The kid isn’t listening. When your brat monster terror child is repeatedly knocking down, stepping on and hurting other children, you need to do more than repeat yourself, since he’s great at ignoring you.

I would normally just quietly redirect my kids and leave, but that day, I stood there for a full 10 seconds daydreaming. I stared into space and imagined telling that Mom just what I thought of her kid and her parenting skills. My daydream may or may not have included a few 4 letter words. Daydreams like this usually end up with me in front of a judge pleading temporary insanity, so I took a different approach. The passive-aggressive approach. I told my kids (louder than necessary) that we were leaving and why. (He is just too little when other big kids were knocking him down and stepping on him.) Luckily neither of them protested since it wasn’t fun anymore.

Pregnancy also makes me weepy (and clumsy and forgetful, which often leads to more weepiness) and over the dumbest things.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, Burger King put mayo on my whopper and I didn’t realize it until I got home. There’s really no way to get the mayo totally off the burger, lettuce and bun and darn it, I really wanted that burger! So…I cried.

I went to Fridays for lunch because all I wanted was their black bean soup. The waitress was brand new and had no idea what I was talking about because they had discontinued it! I managed to leave (without eating) before I cried, and I actually ended up finding a copycat recipe online that was even better (and coincidentally, is my daughter’s-who I was pregnant with at the time-favorite food.)

The extent of my crazy is not limited to food (although that seems to be a common theme.) When I was pregnant with my son, we had sold our house, bought land, and were renting (from a person, but done through our real estate agents) while we built. Unbeknownst to us, the landlord wasn’t paying the mortgage, and hadn’t been for some time. It seems he was using the money we paid him to pay the mortgage on his 5,000 sqft house instead.

Anyhoo, when the real estate agent called to tell me that we would have to move out (and that we would have to start letting strangers in at all hours so they could try to sell the house at a short sale before the foreclosure) I freaked out. I’m not sure when the voice-raising ended and the crying began, but it wasn’t pretty. We’d had a horrible time finding a place with a lease term less than 1-year and now not only was I going to have to move again, but we were going to have to try to find someplace to live for maybe a month, maybe three months. We weren’t totally sure when the house would be done.

Thanks goodness, our friends let us live with them for three months so at least we weren’t homeless, but that was an adventure in itself for sure!

Unfortunately for me, postpartum hormones don’t treat me much better. When my daughter was two weeks old, a neighbor decided to snowblow around 11 P.M. I marched down the street in my pajamas to ask him if he’d lost his everloving mind. (I’m sure he thought I’d lost mine!) Shortly after that, I spilled my lemon extract while making cookies…cried. After that? Tried on my pre-pregnancy jeans & couldn’t get them over my knees. Yep, cried.

I think I should have lived in an era when women “in this delicate condition” were locked out of sight. I’m afraid one of these days I’m going to say what I’m thinking, and it won’t be pretty!

So, if you see me staring into space with a smirk on my face and a devilish glint in my eye, know that I’m probably mentally reaming out the guy who decided to discontinue the Tuscan Turkey sandwich at Quiznos.