This provocative blog post title is brought to you in part by the creativity of Garfunkel and Oates. Check out their music video here.
“Smug” is a term with a negative connotation, no doubt. It is defined as “highly self-satisfied.” The image most people have of a smug person is the face of someone they would pay good money to punch. Punching pregnant women is wrong by the standards of most major religions, so I have to assume applying the term “smug” to all pregnant women is meant to be somewhat hyperbolic.
While I am not willing to go as far as calling all pregnant women “smug” I will step out on a different limb entirely and note that, at one time or another during this extremely important nine months, every single pregnant woman will go bat-sh** crazy in some fashion or another. I mean this in the nicest possible way. In my observation, every human being is a little crazy on the best of days. Some of us naturally have more of the crazy than others. And some of us, because of circumstances, can bring the crazy extra hard.
My wife is an absolute exception to this ironclad, no exception rule. Really.
Undoubtedly, my observations are going to offend someone somewhere. If you are offended and you are not my wife, I frankly don’t care. If you are my wife, and you are offended, please understand I am trying to help other men like me navigate and survive the pregnancy of their significant other. And get cheap laughs. And … I love you?
It’s a noble thing I do. Onward.
The first trimester, as I’ve noted previously, is a time of intense anxiety for the woman. Some women get a little nuts about the various remote threats posed by the world at large during this period, avoiding foods and activities which in 99.9% of cases will do no harm whatsoever. Women also get a little nuts about food in other ways - aversions and cravings. Aversions are just what they sounds like - the opposite of cravings. Things you have no desire to see, smell, taste or touch. Get three women in early stage pregnancy to agree on a menu. I dare you. Odds are good that the only thing one woman can get down at that moment is the one thing guaranteed to make another vomit on sight alone. Your menu will almost certainly consist of saltine crackers, preferably stale, and nothing else. Even water will make some women want to vomit at this point.
Cravings get a little overplayed, but they are legitimate. I haven’t seen the stereotypical pickles and ice cream craving in real life, but my wife went through a strange grapefruit phase in early pregnancy, and although she has avoided red meat for most of our marriage, Rush’s cheeseburgers are the new black in the third trimester. Many cravings are a pregnant body's way of signaling the need for key nutrients. Grapefruit has a lot of folic acid, for instance, and by the third trimester, many pregnant women are anemic and need the extra iron found in red meat. Some cravings get really crazy though, like a desire to eat dirt, paper, or other non-edible materials. Never seen this, but it can really happen. This kind of craving can indicate a serious problem with a nutrient imbalance, among other things, and should be a signal to get medical assistance. (Cue “The More You Know” jingle).
The other stereotypically crazy behavior attributed to pregnancy is the “mood-swing.” I have been fortunate not to experience much of this, but it can happen and it generally isn’t fun for anyone. Crying, yelling, breaking things, and weeping inconsolably are typical behaviors, to say nothing of what the woman is going through. A man or woman can get sad, angry, or generally upset at any time given sufficient cause. Mood swings are so called because they don’t have any logical trigger, or at least because the reaction is out of proportion with the trigger. God help you if you actually give a pregnant woman cause to be upset with you.
Some women get a little crazy about keeping the name of their future child under wraps. I understand the desire to keep a little to yourself, or even to avoid the inevitable criticism of a few who have to stick their two cents in, but in some cases this secret is held onto because of fear that another woman will steal the name for their own child. What is really crazy is that name stealing actually happens. I’ve met a number of people who have been directly or indirectly impacted by name-thieving.
The biggest bowl of crazy though is the least publicized in popular media, and I struggle with a way to describe it simply. The best I can come up with in the short duration of my attention span (about 20 seconds, on average) is the pregnant Opinion.
Take any divisive issue that is even tangentially related to pregnancy or early child-rearing: Natural child-birth or medicated? Home or hospital? Mid-wife or OB? Disposable or reusable diapers? Breastfed or formula? Let them cry it out, or respond to every whimper? On some or all of these issues the average pregnant woman will have an Opinion. That Opinion is not just an opinion, it is tantamount to religious belief. Any other opinion is wrong. There is a zealotry and fervor to some beliefs surrounding pregnancy and child-rearing that was probably not matched by your average soldier on either side of the Crusades. It is a little frightening.
The particular Opinion held by the particular pregnant woman is not so much the issue. On some issues, I may have an opinion that a stance is completely ludicrous, but I am male, therefore my opinion is spelled with a little “o” and does not matter. Since I like my face where it is and in one piece, I keep my opinions on these matters to my damn self. No, the particulars of the Opinion are not what makes them crazy. It is the strength with which they are held that makes them crazy.
Now that I have offended virtually everyone who could read this, let me say that I think (a) pregnancy related crazy is understandable given the intense strain on body and mind for nine months, and (b) most of it starts to dissipate after delivery (ignoring the possibility of post-partem and the inevitable parenting Opinions that will arise). Men take note, and live to see another day. Hopefully, I will as well, and you'll see another post in the near future.
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