The Pregnancy Mood Swing

Staff announcement: I’m preggers, have a bun in the oven, am currently brewing a tiny human. I’ve been calling it T-Rex because we don’t know yet if it is a boy or a girl and for the longest time now it has looked decidedly like a baby reptilian cast member from Jurassic Park. (Don’t worry: mummy and daddy love you!)

Being pregnant gets to you to consider the truly important questions in life such as ‘Why am I starving at 1:43am??’ Prepare to be jealous - I’m hungry like literally all the time. T-Rex is making my body behave like I am composed of an entire male teenage rugby team that must fuel up before the big game in 2 hour’s time. What else could explain why I’m eating every 2 hours and have been a vegetarian since 2017 but suddenly cannot stop watching videos of people cooking bacon on TikTok and fantasising about eating a Big Mac?

I also don’t feel that “mood swings” accurately describe the emotional rollercoaster that is pregnancy - try “personality transplant”. I’ve never been someone who gets really livid at life’s stuff. Correction: never used to be... Pregnant Julie finds everything really REALLY ANNOYING. All of a sudden I am consistently multifaceted annoyed. Things like sunshine, smells in general, the colour orange, laundry detergent, meal times, dumb questions, cottage cheese, obvious jokes (jokes about cottage cheese!), the fact that I now suddenly like the smell of pickles, belts, birds chirping in the morning, hummus, being awake, my husband looking directly at me for more than 5 seconds, and the speed the earth rotates around the sun all now have the ability to re-set my personality dial to ‘Outrage Condition: Fuming.’

My hubby now has the loathsome ability to get me really irate when then does dumb, selfish, truly inconsiderate things such as cook dinner, spray too much deodorant, or be alive in my general vicinity. And then it’s like I bypass sanity and go from:

7:02 pm: Honey, I love you profoundly!

To

7:03 pm: Errmaggoddd!! I will punch you in the throat if you ever breathe on me again!

Then back to

7:04 pm: You’re the best husband in the whole wide world!! How did I get so lucky?!

Calling that a “mood swing” would be accurate if you define “mood swing” as one of those vicious gravity-defying swing rides at a theme park that drops you so hard and fast that, on the way down, it rearranges all your internal organs then swaps your personality with a person sitting nearby, on the way back up. (In fact; now that I think about it, ‘The Pregnancy Mood Swing’ would be an excellently appropriate name for one of those theme park swing rides...) My hormones hate me right now - and, most often, my hubby - and it’s no fun for either of us. They say that pregnant women have a ‘glow’ about them and it’s true; it’s the sweat you generate from desperately trying to control the violent mood swings and not irrationally kill your husband by overreacting to him chewing a grape “too loudly”.

But it’s not all bad! There are many benefits to being pregnant which I shall now list below:

1. Obviously coming in first is that you are making a cute baby human/T-Rex. 

2. You finally qualify for a Mother’s Day gift. 

3. But a close third is that I don’t have to do much housework ATM as I’m brewing a human here and thusly have to protect my geriatric uterus (I turn 40 in 2 months’ time). Besides; my schedule is pretty jam packed at the moment what with spending every waking minute desperately trying my hardest not to either overreact and yell at my husband, start a riot, or vomit. And doing any heavy lifting raises the risk of miscarriage at my age. When I first discovered this I announced enthusiastically to my husband that I simply couldn’t do any laundry, vacuuming, grocery shopping, rotating the mattress, wheelbarrowing, operating heavy machinery, tunnel boring, or combine harvesting for roughly the next 8 months. And being the amazing human that he is; he was down with that. 

   How did I ever get so lucky?!