The preggo rage is real
Last week, I was lucky enough to be awarded a place on the waiting list for the queue to buy Taylor Swift tour tickets. It’s worth noting that the queue itself undoubtedly has many times more people in it than they are tickets available, so this is very much a kind way of Tay Tay saying ‘no fucking chance’, but honestly, given how much time I have spent waiting around for things recently (and becoming increasingly furious) I am actually grateful for the gentle rejection. ‘Don’t bother love’ is so much easier to handle than ‘we are experiencing a high volume of calls right now, but will put you through in somewhere between 87 and 270 minutes’, don’t you think?
I recently lost my mind at the opticians after having to wait 35 minutes for an appointment that I had scheduled in my lunch hour (it’s a 16 minute walk each way to Specsavers, so I had it all perfectly timed). I was so pissed off by the point I finally sat down in the optician’s chair that I could barely speak, was too enraged to do the test properly, and have now ended up with a massive and expensive prescription change which I think is more down to my fury than an actual alteration in eyesight. Sigh.
A couple of days before that I waited an hour and a half for a routine maternity appointment in a stifling hot St Thomas’s hospital (again, in my lunch hour, while panicking about my deadlines piling up). ‘Sorry, the computers aren’t working’ the obstetrician told me when I finally saw him, leading murderous thoughts about how much NHS resource is wasted simply because no one has thought to buy enough new routers or hire enough IT blokes to sort them out promptly.
Two things are colliding here: the world being in a general state of hopeless chaos, where nothing works properly, and me being 23 weeks pregnant and filled with so many hormones that I can transform from normal person to a teeth-baring chimp in less than three seconds flat. Maybe it’s being pregnant with a boy? Perhaps I simply have a lot more testosterone floating round in my system, because I don’t remember feeling like this when carrying my daughter.
Two days ago, after losing my shit at a Gail’s employee because he merely shrugged when my digital loyalty card didn’t work for the eighth flipping time in a row, I got back to my desk and Googled ‘Does being pregnant make you dick?’ Unfortunately, the results were all about keeping your love life alive during pregnancy, which was very much the last thing I was looking for, so instead I turned to some mum friends on Whatsapp, who all confirmed that yes, pregnancy can make you a monster and no, there’s not much you can do to control it, beyond simply slowing down and doing less. At least then there’s less to get annoyed about.
I will try to take this advice to heart. In the meantime, I would like to start warning shop assistants and healthcare professionals about my current hormonal state, so would appreciate it if someone could make me on of those ‘Baby on board’ badges, but with the added caveat ‘May bite if provoked’.