Pregnancy Makes You Crazy

Tracey: It's me hormones, innit? I'm in ferment. I'm suffering from mood swings.

Sharon: No, it's me that's suffering from 'em!

— Birds of a Feather, "Ghost"

When a woman becomes pregnant, her hormones kick into overdrive. While helpful to the baby, this can result in her brain acting rather oddly. Common ways this can manifest include:

• Becoming extremely irritable
• Crying easily for silly reasons
• Acting loopy
• Just plain stupidity

Her friends and family, particularly her husband, will most often be the audience for her moods, and you can expect ensuing shenanigans to be played for laughs.

Compare All Periods Are PMS, Mood-Swinger, Hysterical Woman, Wacky Cravings, and Pregnancy Does Not Work That Way.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• In the third season of Hell Girl, there is one episode where a mother becomes abusive towards her little step-son after she has become pregnant, since she values her own unborn daughter more than her step-son. The step-son resolves this problem by sending his unborn sister to hell, resulting that his mother becomes nice again.

Comic Books

• In the Warrior Cats graphic novel A Thief in ThunderClan, this is discussed:
  • The medicine cat Cinderpelt explains to Brightheart that being pregnant can make she-cats excessively worried about the dangers of the forest.
  • Brightheart uses this as an excuse when trying to investigate the stolen fresh-kill. She wants to compare her Clanmates' claws to some markings she found, so she claims that being pregnant makes her want to chew on some burdock roots and asks some of her Clanmates to dig it up for her. Thornclaw seems skeptical at first but helps out, commenting that mothers-to-be are just strange.

Fan Works

• Ace In The Hole (Persona 5) has Yukari's Took a Level in Jerkass behavior in the Playable Epilogue The Answer from Persona 3 become this - her boyfriend, Minato Arisato, knocked her up shortly before he died.
• Inverted in the Cabin Fever fanfiction Cabin Fever: Promises To Keep. From Marcy's recollection, it seems she was suffering from severe depression and/or PTSD over the death of her friends (including the unwitting father of her baby) during the early weeks of her pregnancy. But the realization that she was about to become a mother with responsibilities prompted her to get her shit together and brought her back from the brink of madness to stability.
• Zigzagged in The Addams Family fanfiction Morticia Is Pregnant. While pregnant with Pugsley, Morticia wears shorts instead of her normal dress and she becomes much lazier. The others point out that this behavior is unusual, which suggests that it's because of the pregnancy, but Morticia acts Out of Character in moments when she isn't even pregnant and a lot of other characters are out-of-character too, so it's hard to tell.
• In the Fairy Tail fanfic Second Son Lucy gets very angry at Natsu after he nearly gets himself killed. He is a little taken off guard by her temper, Gray tells him it is likely the hormones. Keep in mind she went from not being pregnant to being nine months pregnant over the course of one night so she may be a little on edge to begin with and Natsu's reckless behavior doesn't help.
• In the final chapter of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Twilight's Love, Twilight becomes pregnant with her and Flash Sentry's child (a colt who they name Dusk Glow). During the later months of her pregnancy, Twilight became highly emotional and often lashed out at Flash.
  • It happens to her again in the 3rd chapter of the next story The Young Prince where she is pregnant with a second child, a filly named Starlight Twinkle^note The story was made before Starlight Glimmer was introduced. However, it was merely mentioned rather than going into detail about it.

Film — Live-Action

• Dog Days (2018): While pregnant, Ruth becomes incredibly high strung, prone to flying into a rage over minor inconveniences.
• Combined with Love Makes You Crazy in Night School (1981). After learning she is pregnant, Eleanor starts murdering all of the women her partner has been unfaithful with, and then anyone who threatens him or his career.
• Prevenge: Very literally. After the death of her partner, Ruth starts hearing the voice of her fetus telling her to kill people. More subtly, she was driven mad by learning that her now-deceased partner didn't want to have the kid.
• In Waitress, After Jenna gets pregnant by her domestic abusive husband, she gets in a passionate affair with her married doctor.

Literature

• In Mr Monk And The Blue Flu, Natalie goes clothes shopping with her boss and a heavily pregnant woman rudely snatches a blouse Natalie wanted for Julie away from her. Natalie tries to take it in stride, telling herself that hormones can affect people nastily and the other woman might be very friendly otherwise. However, then Monk deduces that the woman is part of a shoplifting ring and her "baby bump" actually contains a bunch of stolen merchandise, including the blouse, which Natalie triumphantly reclaims.
• Roys Bedoys: Downplayed in “Mommy is Pregnant, Roys Bedoys!”, where Mrs. Bedoys is pregnant and it makes her moody and spacey and she gets a hot flush at one point.
• In the Warrior Cats book River of Fire, Dovewing explains that she'd left the Clan because she'd been having nightmares of the nursery being destroyed and her kits dying. Daisy exclaims that all she-cats have weird dreams when pregnant and she could have just told her that so there was no need to leave, but Alderheart isn't so convinced that it was just the paranoid worries of a pregnant she-cat, since the nursery was damaged while she was gone.
• In The Wheel of Time, Elayne Trakand gets pregnant in Book 9 and nearly all of her POV segments involve her trying to fight off her various mood swings as a result, especially while she's vying for the throne of her home country.

Live-Action TV

• Amen: As hers and the Reverend's first anniversary approaches, Thelma displays everyone of the symptoms listed in the page description. Her father notes that her mother was the same way as their first anniversary arrived—"laughing and giggling one minute, throwing pots and pans at me the next. But she had a good excuse—she was pregnant." His, Amelia's, and Rolly's eyes widen as they realize the likely reason for Thelma's loopy behavior. Sure enough, she's expecting. She continues with this behavior for several episodes afterwards.
• Call the Midwife plays this for drama with Pamela, who suffers from a rare real-life condition called postpartum psychosis after her baby is born. Pamela becomes paranoid and obsessed with germs and the idea that other people want to hurt her baby, and has to be talked down from jumping into the Thames with the child, then admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
• In Cheers, Lilith turns into a back-to-nature-Earth-mother type during the later stages of her pregnancy, acting so nuts that Frasier can only wearily state that he's planning on having her committed.
• On Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Myra's begins having disturbing sleepwalking episodes, at one point, springing up in bed and singing a ragtime song-and-dance number. This all turns out to be because she's pregnant.
• In Frasier, at least in the pair of episodes involving Maris (and her eventual murder and imprisonment), when Daphne became pregnant, her fuse became shorter.
• Friends:
  • When Phoebe chooses to become a surrogate mother for her brother Frank, she becomes even more eccentric than usual. At one point, her friends decide to throw her a baby shower, to which she reacts by laughing hysterically, then crying for no reason.
    Phoebe: (sobbing) I don't know why...
  • For the most part averted when Rachel is pregnant with Emma, but towards the end (especially when she is overdue) she becomes very cranky and snaps at everyone for little things like breathing too loudly.
    Ross: You know, we should probably ask the doctor if she even knows how to deliver a baby that's half human, half pure evil.
• Game of Thrones: Cersei is known to be pregnant as the end of season 7. While this doesn't explain her increasing Stupid Evil tendencies, it certainly couldn't have helped to restrain them (at one point she comes close to ordering the execution of her brother, lover and only ally Jaime).
• General Hospital's Laura finds herself bursting into tears over everything and can't understand why. She complains "I haven't felt like this since. . ." then starts crying again as she says "Oh. . .that's right." Only this time, they're Tears of Joy, as she's recalling that the last time she felt like this was when she was pregnant and is realizing that she is again.
• Gilmore Girls: Sookie becomes extremely melodramatic during her pregnancies, in addition to her Wacky Cravings messing up her sense of smell to the point that she cooks food that tastes like manure and thinks it tastes fine. The second time, the Dragonfly Inn temporarily taking lunch off the menu for budget reasons makes Sookie hysterical, which makes her realize she's pregnant. Lorelai downplays this trope, as her only wacky pregnancy craving was a hankering for fruit, which actually is pretty crazy for her.
• In Happy!, Amanda tries to invoke this toward Nick and Hailey to explain away her erratic behavior, which is actually brought on by drug addiction.
• How I Met Your Mother: It becomes a plot point during Lily's pregnancy that she begins to act very irrationally and scrambling her words, which the others blame on "pregnancy brain". On Halloween, she answers the door and gives the trick-or-treaters a stapler, and later realizes what she has done and starts crying because she misses the stapler.
  Lily: I've got pregnancy brain like a fiddle and I've been playing you like a fox.
• In the I Love Lucy episode "Pregnant Women are Unpredictable", Lucy becomes insecure when Ricky gives their unborn child a lot of attention. Someone advises Ricky to pay attention to Lucy and only her for a while. This seems to cheer her up, but partway through dinner, she breaks down crying because Ricky hasn't talked about the baby at all and must not love him/her.
• In My Name Is Earl, Earl recalls how he once had a friend named Raynard, who let Earl and Randy crash with him when their father threw them out of the house (again). Not too much later, Earl had his Accidental Marriage to a very pregnant Joy (who had been kicked out of her parents' house for becoming pregnant out of wedlock). Raynard came knocking on Earl's trailer, saying that he got evicted and needed a place to stay. Earl replied that though he would love to help, he has a wife now, who's pregnant and as a result, irritable. Joy starts yelling at them that they're being too loud (they were whispering), and then tearfully accuses Earl of not caring about her, before wetting the bed. Earl feels guilty for not being able to help his friend.
  Randy: It wasn't your fault. Joy was so mean when she was pregnant! And when she's not.
• Star Trek: Voyager. Played for drama when Half-Human Hybrid B'Elanna Torres is going to give birth and wants the Doctor to genetically remove any Klingon traits from her child so she won't have to put up with the Fantastic Racism that B'Elanna did. Everyone else thinks her concerns are exaggerated, and given that B'Elanna is a tsundere it's not surprising she blows her top when she thinks she's being patronized.
  Torres: I just don't want her to start at a disadvantage.
  Paris: Look, the Doctor said you might experience mood swings.
  Torres: That's it—just dismiss my argument as some kind of hormonal outburst!

Webcomics

• This is touched on in Queen of Wands during Shannon's pregnancy; her mood swings in at least one strip utterly baffle Kestrel, who decides that a woman's sanity must be directly inverse to the occupancy of her uterus.
• Something*Positive has one arc - appropriately named "The Womb of Insanity" - where Tamara snaps at Mike over every little thing, including moments he's trying to be nice. PeeJee sets her straight about how unfair she's being, and that Mike is no longer an Extreme Doormat who's willing to take any level of abuse just to be with a woman.

Websites

• One Not Always Right story has a woman attributing her buying dog food when she has a cat to her pregnancy.

Western Animation

• A rare male example in the Fairly OddParents special "Fairly OddBaby" (Poof's debut episode). Cosmo and Wanda want a baby so Timmy wishes them one, but this makes Cosmo pregnant because the male fairies carry the baby. What follows until the 2nd half of the special is Cosmo ticking all of the boxes for this trope, having weird cravings and mood swings, and also constantly throwing up on Timmy, all exaggerated for comedic effect.
• In a cutaway on Family Guy, a pregnant Lois is seen laughing, hysterically sobbing then puking wildly when Chris asks about his lost jacket.
• The Flintstones: In the special where an adult Pebbles is pregnant, she flies off the handle and rants at someone at her job.

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