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How to Handle Hormone Hell

The Mommy Menagerie On…Maternity Moodiness

I posed the question, “Can you offer a scenario that would exemplify a wild pregnancy mood shift?” Here’s what some mommies said:

“I didn’t have momentary mood shifts. I think I had long cycles of hormonal swings—a few weeks of sad (boo-hoo), inexplicable rage for two weeks, and then content (resigned?) for the rest of it.”

“I was totally psychotic. I was so snappy at my husband it was awful. But the worst part was, I couldn’t control it.”

“My hysterical laughing. A lot of women cry. I would laugh over the silliest things and not be able to stop. Eventually I would start tearing up, crying, and laughing.”

“Honestly, I think I was just cranky through the whole thing. Pretty consistently.”

“I didn’t have major mood shifts, though every once in a while something super-bitchy would come out of my mouth out of nowhere.”

“On occasion, I would go from ‘Oh, how wonderful to be pregnant’ to ‘What the hell am I doing, thinking I can handle this responsibility?’”

“The hunger that would seize me in the first trimester was unreal. I would go from happy mock cocktail girl to snarling starving crazy woman in 60 seconds.”

“One minute you are the sweetest person in the world, the next you have realized someone has eaten all the Fruit Loops and left you none and you go hysterical.”

“Bursting into uncontrollable tears in a restaurant when I am told it will be a 30-minute wait to get a table.”

“Driving on the freeway and having to eat RIGHT THEN and my husband missed the exit to get to the McDonalds. I started screaming at him and then threw a bag of pretzels all over the car because I needed the bag to catch my vomit. Luckily the vomit helped my husband to feel sorry for me instead of hating me for screaming at him.”

“Just a general feeling of anger that would come out of nowhere and was generally directed at my husband. It was like watching myself from a distance.”

“One minute I would want my husband to be the farthest thing away from me, for no reason at all, I would hate him. The next minute all I wanted was to be like a baby in his arms.”

“Screaming at my husband; feeling he didn’t care and wasn’t giving me and the belly enough attention. Hating him one minute, loving him the next. Ugh.”

“I don’t remember doing this, but my husband still likes to tease me about it. He calls it ‘I love you—what’s your problem?!’ because that’s essentially what I said in the span of 10 seconds. I was all affectionate, like, ‘Oh, I’m so glad we’re having this baby and isn’t it wonderful and you’re so great but you do this sometimes (or whatever it was) and I don’t understand why you do that—why do you do that? What’s your problem?!’”

“My husband sat down and ate an entire jar of pickles one day. I normally wouldn’t care, but I got mad and yelled at him for an hour! Over a jar of pickles!!! We still laugh about it to this day.”

“My husband would often say when I was moody about something completely juvenile like the weather or something, ‘Who took my wife and when is she coming back?’”

“At the end of the day, when I was looking forward to resting, finding out that my husband was coming home late would quickly shift my mood.”

“I came home one day from work and I’d had a good day. My mom was supposed to come over to my house that night for dinner and I was looking forward to it, but she was about 30 minutes late. I started to become intensely nervous, obsessively looking out the window, calling her. Then I started calling her friends. I was hysterically crying and convinced she was hurt. Turns out she was just running late at work in the field and her cell phone didn’t work where she was.”

“My mother and I were leaving to go shopping. I was in a great mood, excited about buying stuff for the baby and she had to run back in the house to get her coffee. I got so mad over having to wait that I had a fit and went home.”

“I was about to go into the grocery store with my husband when I ran into a woman with infant twins. Like I always did when I saw a woman with twins, I stopped her to ask how it was going and what it was like. She looked at me wide-eyed as she unloaded her baby girls and said it was really hard. I burst into tears and continued to cry inconsolably throughout the grocery store.”

“Sobbing when my husband saw me naked at 36 weeks and he offhandedly remarked how big I had gotten.”

“I’ve been down and very emotional this time around. It’s very disturbing to me that I can’t seem to get a grip. I feel out of control emotionally and my husband doesn’t get it.”

“Wild pregnancy mood shifts would usually be precipitated by something really important, like the shirt I wanted to wear being in the laundry, or dropping something I was holding, being out of chocolate, or my husband failing to read my mind.”

“I remember needing to re-arrange the house almost on a daily basis in my last two months, and the urgency of it. It was a dire need for some reason. I specifically remember that we were having a nice quiet dinner and I looked into the living room and decided the couch was not in the right spot, so I got up and had to move it and all the other furniture immediately. My husband innocently said, ‘Let’s just wait until after dinner, hon’ and—from my reaction—you would think he had just committed the most horrible sin on earth. I verbally attacked him. I don’t have any idea what I said, but I remember his eyes opening wide in fright, and him jumping up from the table to help me, without complaint. We moved that couch about 10 times in the final trimester and it ended up right back where it started. It’s the family joke now.”

“I didn’t know if we should take the perfect apartment because we could not park our car right outside our door. I actually made my husband call our Rabbi and ask him to make the decision if we should take the great apartment or not! He told me to run back and take it and not be crazy.”

Mommy and well-known lifestyle writer Erika Lenkert is a frequent contributor to In Style, Everyday with Rachel Ray, and dozens of other national publications.  She has authored several lifestyle books, including The Last Minute Party Girl: Fashionable, Fearless, and Foolishly Simple Entertaining and Raw: The Uncook Book.  Known for combining wit and wisdom, Erika is committed to helping today’s mommy-to-be shirk the prevailing pregnancy paranoia so that she can confidently revel in all the weird, wacky, and downright funky stuff that comes with making human from scratch. Check out her book, The Real Deal Guide to Pregnancy at Amazon.com

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