Feelings: their sadistic plot to fuck with your life.

Feelings are rough.  Someone once told me (she was a professional – I paid her) that choice and feelings were generally not something that went together.  They are what they are and as a grown up it’s my job to feel them, acknowledge them and then, as  a grown up, decide what to do with them.

Are they real?  Are they worth my time and overactive thoughts? Are my overactive thoughts going to change the outcome of these feelings at all?  Or is it all just bullshit thrown at me by overactive hormones or other outside factors?  What I’ve discovered is that her theory about feelings and choice is correct.  I’m still working on the choice to deal with them or let them go… (No surprises but it’s the let them go part that I struggle with)  but in the end they (the feelings) have their own little voices and their own sadistic plot to fuck you up at every turn.  You have no choice in their arrival – only on what you do with them.

This evil plot may sound extreme, but lately I’ve discovered there’s a different branch of feelings that come with fuck all choices.  I am pregnant.  And all of those things that I didn’t really believe from my previously pregnant friends – it’s time to apologise.

Yes – the morning sickness is fucked.  Beyond fucked.  Yes, the overwhelming feelings are a constant wet-fish face slap but I still refuse to blame my hormones.  My hormones are growing a human.  My brain is struggling to keep up with monstrosity of tasks that is going to be my life after November. My brain is the thing that can’t take any more – it’s not my hormones.

The only way I can liken this overwhelming inability to deal with information, small tasks, minor problems is to compare it to the red wine ramble or the tequila come down.  Other people experience this phenomenon on gin too, but for me – it’s always been red wine or tequila.  (On the side – if I had a left nut, I’d give it for a red wine right now.)

The lack of control of your own feelings AND your responses to those exists the same in pregnancy as it does after two bottles of pinot on the couch with your best friend.  It’s the ramble of emotions, the disjointed thoughts and sentences and the crying snot that all came from your inability to find that souvenir wine glass from such and such’s wedding you went to three years ago.

Your brain is filled with things you’ve been pretending to ignore.  The little details that don’t need thinking about on a day to day basis, that you purposefully bury at the base of your brain, are filling up and starting to occupy your frontal lobe.  Like the red wine, pregnancy hormones are like a big shovel throwing those things at the front of your skull so you can’t forget them.  The red wine, insert pregnancy hormones, then have the audacity to stop you from adding or processing even the most simplest of thoughts or problems.

The tears and snot, the anger, the reverence of a romanticised past, the misappropriated attachment to your ex – all come pouring out of your eyeballs and face because you’ve lost your favourite pen.  The heightened response isn’t because your hormones made you do it.  The heightened, volatile, unpredictable response to your instagram crush getting engaged is because your brain is so busy dealing with the fact that you’ve chosen to be a solo mother, your actually pregnant, you’ve done this to yourself with no one else to blame and you have no idea how you’re going to hold your own baby and go to the toilet when there isn’t anyone else in the house, that there is just no space left to problem solve how you managed to wash your red socks with your white shirts.

The good news is the hang over for Pregnancy Hormone Induced Irrational Responses (PHIIR – pronounced PURR for short) is non-existent.  You bounce back much faster than the regret filled mornings of a post red wine or tequila binge.  While this confuses your loved ones to no end, for the actual pregnant person – it’s a god send.  It also gives you licence to allow yourself the outbursts at things that have completely pissed you off for the last thirty-seven years.

A rage about dishes in the sink, that woman at work who is always handing over her jobs to Joan on the front desk, a teary wail of regret about that man you walked away from, a teary wail of regret about the one you didn’t walk away from – it’s all yours for the verbalising.  Say it all, apologise, and tell the poor bastard recipient of your outburst that it wasn’t you, it was the hormones.  While this is not a recommended course of action by the woman I pay to help me deal with my issues, I can’t help but think it has gotten many a pregnant woman out of a pickle in the past.

PHIIR is not the best thing about being pregnant.  It reminds me how much I miss wine but it also reminds me of the magnitude of what I’ve done.  The choice to be pregnant was just that.  A choice.  I didn’t get pregnant because I felt like it.  It was a weighed, conscious, financial decision.  It has consequences and they are huge. And scary.  PHIIR is just a reminder that I’ve chosen to change my life.  And if the worst thing it does is let me cry and binge watch Netflix because I’ve lost my Strawberry Shortcake dolls from when I was four, then I think by the time she gets here, I might have been able to solve the toilet and unsupervised baby debacle of motherhood.  Here’s hoping.