Food Tears

I have cried a lot about cheese these last 9 months

Pregnancy and childbirth require incredible physical and mental strength. But also, there's The Crying.

For awhile, I was keeping track of the more ridiculous spells in a Notes file in my phone entitled "Things I've Cried About," because some of the swells of tearful emotion were funny after they'd passed, but I stopped keeping that list up because the act of writing down the crying stimuli would occasionally cause me to start crying again. (The one that did me in was "puppy wearing a tie to be adopted." I can barely type it now without feeling like my tear ducts are about to make like open fire hydrants. Children could frolic in the volume of my tears over that puppy's tie.)

Pregnancy's attendant surge of hormones can have vastly different effects on different people, but in many, those hormones can cause emotional responses that are disproportionate to whatever is happening around them. I hesitate to characterize pregnancy as "an emotional time," because there are times that I've felt perfectly well-adjusted and balanced, just as there have been times when I've felt like my emotions are a wave pool and I am a broken kickboard being tossed around on them. Pregnancy is "an erratic time." Pregnancy is a time of hunger and a time of puking.

The first time I experienced The Crying was pretty early on. We had rented a cabin in the mountains in a random town in southern Utah, with the intent to spend our time in the snow and altitude working without the distractions of the city. One the last night we were there, Josh made steak on a day that I had a particular yen for steak, and the taste of it brought me to tears. I'm sure it was a good steak; I just don't normally cry over meat.

Actually, looking back on it, much of The Crying I've experienced antenatally has been about food. There was the time that I really wanted a breakfast sandwich like the kind I used to get at the corner store below my apartment in New York City (where I haven't lived in over three years, so who knows how accurate my memory this particular sandwich might be), and Josh made a version of it for me, and the kindness of the gesture combined with the deliciousness of the sandwich brought me to tears.

But it's not all gratitude. Earlier this week, Josh threw out a pound of Colby cheese that, in his defense, had been in our fridge for a long time but, in my defense, hadn't been opened. I had really wanted to eat the cheese as part of a disgusting snack involving venison summer sausage slices and Ritz crackers formed into a sort of Wisconsin trash sandwich, but I didn't have the cheese so the snack plan was ruined. I was only atomically upset for about five minutes, but for those five minutes, I could not have been more upset if Josh had lost his wedding ring.

Another time, I had read that sardines are particularly healthy for pregnant people and their offspring's developing brains. And so I picked out a Sicilian recipe involving pasta, bread crumbs, olive oil, herbs, and sardines. But, unfortunately, I had failed to keep in mind when grocery shopping that the thing that I wanted to eat the least during the first 5 months or so of pregnancy were pungent fish. I went through the entire process of cooking the food, trying to convince myself that my greatest food aversion could be overcome through sheer willpower. It could not. I choked down a few bites through tears as Josh told me "you don't have to do this." I ended up making him finish his food in the kitchen because I couldn't even look at it. That's how big a baby I was at that moment. Brought low by a sardine.

I asked some social media followers about silly things that had made them (or their partners) melt down during pregnancy, and it turns out, a lot of tears-- from happy to enraged-- start with food.

Here are a few:

I decided to make chicken for dinner but couldn’t stand the sight of any kind of meat. I stood in my kitchen, wailing, “The chiiiiiicken has to be cooked!”

On a family vacation, my step-mom made pigs-in-blankets one morning and they were all gone by the time I came downstairs. No one saved any for me. Devastated.

My wife cried during her pregnancy because the vanilla ice cream she thought she'd picked up at the grocery store turned out to be butter pecan. This was made funnier by the fact that outside of when she was pregnant, I'm the emotional one of the two of us. Nothing makes her cry.

I asked my husband to go to the store and buy me a coffee cake, so he bought this fancy specialty coffee cake for like $22. I cried and cried when he returned with it, because what I had actually WANTED was like a $4 Entenman’s Danish and had mistakenly called it “coffee cake.”

I bought red fruit by the foots and my husband ate them all and replaced them with blue ones, which were NOT what I was craving. Anguish.

KFC mashed potatoes at 8:30 pm. Got dressed, drove up the street, hubby wanted McDonald's fries, McDonald's was on the way and you can see KFC from the McDonald's drive thru. While he is getting fries thru the window, the lights went off at KFC. They closed while I watched. I sobbed.

I told my partner I wasn't that into pies during a cooking show and fifteen minutes later she was still inconsolable.

We found out I was pregnant because I started to make ground lamb for dinner and he found me on the kitchen floor, crying,"We're eating BABIES!"

The cereal grape nuts. It’s all I wanted, but I’m a type one diabetic so even a small serving was too many carbs for me to eat at a time. I tried to make a replacement out of low carb options and then cried because that sucked

I sobbed to the waitress at an old fashioned ice cream shop because I really really needed the hot fudge to be drizzled and not stuck on the bottom layer of the sundae.

At least we can laugh about it now.

Image via Shutterstock.