OK, I remembered, and it is earthshaking.

Well, actually not. But: what I remembered is that the other night I was talking to someone about the emotionalness of pregnancy, and I said, "I don't really think I'm more emotional now that I'm pregnant." Now those who know me well might be thinking, "Now that's really saying a lot....NOT," and I would have to say they are right....I'm sort of an emotional person and I cry easily. But, with that said, I asked Alexander, who would certainly know if anyone would, and he agreed. In fact, he said, "Less." "What?" I asked. "You're less emotional now that you're pregnant." I agree. So....put that in your pipe and smoke it. Isn't that strange? But I have a theory related to this, that I will go into in the third paragraph. First I have to digress and appear to disprove my own point...

So for the sake of being sort of honest, I do admit that there was that one time recently when I started crying in the middle of Target -- I had called Alexander on the phone and asked what color helmet he wanted for an upcoming nighttime bike ride, and he said, "No helmet, I'd rather not go," (??#$%#$%@????!!???) and to me, since I'm carrying his child, that meant "I'm not going to do everything I can to stay safe so I can be around and not a vegetable for our child," and so naturally, I hung up on him, sat down on the lowest shelf of the aisle, and cried. When he called me back, he soon realized that foregoing the helmet would be generally hazardous to everyone's health, whether anyone crashed or not, so he told me to get the helmet. (Whew.) But THAT is directly attributable to the FACT of pregnancy, I think, like this weird protective thing where suddenly there's this child to worry about and you can't just freely not wear a helmet because you don't feel like it anymore because it's not all about you. And this possibly hits the mother first since she's the one whose body is incubating the little bundle of cells. So, what I'm saying about that cute little incident, is that it doesn't count as a random "Why did I cry about that? Must be because I'm so emotional these days," -- it was not random and it's very easy to trace why I did. So. Point being:

I know some people who were extremely very happy, like over the moon, the whole time they were pregnant. One or two of those were people who had some chemical imbalances that were later corrected by medication. (As for me, I have tendencies toward mild depression and an SSRI that works great for it, which I'm still taking... I explain that because that's how this could relate to me...) Anyway, this is my theory, and, um, maybe other people have had it -- I haven't looked it up: certain chemical imbalances are temporarily "cured" or greatly improved during pregnancy, because, I don't know, some combination of the pregnancy hormones supplies whatever's missing usually. Now, for the next part I know there are many interrelating factors, but: This would be a partial explanation, or an explanation in some cases, for why certain women have kid after kid when it seems that they don't really love them that much once they've arrived and/or their socioeconomic situation would indicate that maybe fewer kids would be a better choice. Maybe a woman like this spends her entire life very depressed/angry/hopeless and the only time she's happy is when she's pregnant. For someone steeped in an undiagnosed, untreated illness related to chemical imbalance, nine months of freedom would be like heaven. Well-worth the consequences. Interesting, no?