Incubating Crazy

Pregnancy does a lot of weird things to your body and emotions. While I haven’t wanted to throw things at Jon’s head during the past eight months, I have been a lot more emotional. I started calling these crying bouts “episodes.” Jon and I will be sitting on the couch watching TV and I will have to get up and go to the bathroom for tissue. No reason. I’ll just feel like crying suddenly. And, he has been so sweet and understanding of my sudden onset of insanity. But, in all honesty- men have to at least feel a little panic when women start to cry… especially when it isn’t related to anything because there’s nothing they can fix. Sometimes I’ll try and leave the room so he doesn’t know and doesn’t have to deal with the absurdity of it all. But sometimes he just puts his arm around me and lets me cry on his shoulder until I pull myself together.

Hormones are unpredictable and some days/weeks they are more overwhelming than others. I may have one really emotional week, then be totally sane again for the next two weeks. The uncertainty of it all has made Jon paranoid. Now whenever something sad happens on TV, or when there’s even the slightest possibility I could find something emotional, he will look at me and ask, “Are you going to cry?” Being crazy can’t be nearly as challenging as living with crazy.

I wish I could blame hormones on the overwhelming sense of urgency I feel about everything these days. Someone mentions Chips Ahoy and I’m in Publix twenty minutes later grabbing a bag and a pint of milk. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about how I need to rake and mulch the flower beds around the house. I mean, I can barely get up from a full squat, much less clean out and mulch the flower beds. I had a dream the baby arrived several weeks early and nothing was ready. No crib. No diapers. Nothing. So, in my dream I did what every normal person would do… I tried to put the baby back. No, not in the same sense it comes into this world. I tried holding it really close to my stomach as though it would just morph back through the skin and go back into my uterus. I’ll take episodes of crying over this kind of crazy any day. I also dreamed our baby was born with a mustache, but I’m trying to forget about that one.