I once had a friend who was a self-confessed mean drunk. “I just don’t get it,” he said to me one day. “Whenever I drink, everybody else turns into an asshole.”<\/p>\n
I can relate to this right now. I simply don’t understand why, every time I hit the third trimester of pregnancy, everybody and everything is suddenly so bloody irritating.<\/p>\n
You certainly wouldn’t be thinking that it might just possibly be me, are you? ARE YOU<\/em>?<\/p>\n Okay, so I admit it, it is <\/em>me. I’m well aware of the fact, in some logical corner of my brain, that I seem to be lacking any sort of reserve of patience right now. Unfortunately, that small, lonely voice of intellectual acknowledgement gets drowned out when screaming banshee woman takes over and throws a temper tantrum because we’ve run out of mustard and nobody bothered to tell me. <\/p>\n The worst part is that if you were drawing a graph that delineates my relative irritability throughout the day, you’d see that it peaks in the same two places each day, which, coincidentally or not, usually match the times of greatest contact with my family: the hour between after-work and dinnertime, and the boys’ bedtime.<\/p>\n I try, I really do try, not to snap at the boys. I don’t want to be crazy-ranting-mother who goes off the deep end just because the kids have been asked to brush their teeth eleventy-hundred million times and instead are chasing the cat around the house. It’s not their fault I’m pregnant, and unlike their darling father who has learned to either do his best to placate me or get the hell out of the way when I’m in a mood, they don’t get why I’ve gone ’round the bend or that it’s (oh please, let it be) only temporary. <\/p>\n We were in the grocery store the other day, itself the font of much irritability, and I found myself being that woman<\/em>, the one who speaks to her children in a barely controlled growl easily overheard by people standing nearby, who says incredibly helpful things like, “I brought you out here to get you a nice treat of cheese strings and you repay my kindness by goofing around and not listening to me and why can’t you just stand there and be good for two minutes because I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE!” What was actually pissing me off was the slow-moving self-scan line and the people who cut in front of me and the fact that I was tired at the end of a long day; the beneficiaries of this build-up and overflow of crankiness was, unforgivably, the boys.<\/p>\n I’ve apologized to both Beloved and the boys after particularly heinous displays of crank, and explained to the boys that everybody has bad days sometimes, but I want to work harder at preventing flare-ups of temper. What is it about this stage of pregnancy that makes my fuse so short anyway? You can only blame the hormones and the sleep-deprivation for so much, ya know? The good side, I suppose, is that while the periods of pique are sometimes intense and rather unpredictable, they are usually short-lived, rather like a summer storm.<\/p>\n I’d welcome your thoughts. Is this something common to all pregnant women, or just an amplification of my own occasional temper issues? What can I do to either amplify the tiny voice of reason that says, “Um, excuse me, you’ve just teetered off the edge of testy and into the abyss of ranting lunatic” or learn to step back from the cliff in the first place? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I once had a friend who was a self-confessed mean drunk. “I just don’t get it,” he said to me one day. “Whenever I drink, everybody else turns into an asshole.” I can relate to this right now. I simply don’t understand why, every time I hit the third trimester of pregnancy, everybody and everything … Continue reading “The unbearable crankiness of pregnancy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-postcards-from-my-uterus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}