Poor Troy....

My family has a BAD habit of saying "Poor Troy!" on a very regular basis. My normal response is "Poor Troy?! What about me?!", but I usually get a look that shuts me up pretty quickly.

When they give me that particular look I can see in their eyes 18 years of hard-headed screaming matches with my mom, throwing a 2-gallon water bottle at my dad's head after a lost soccer game, and once (before the age of 5) peeing on my sister's head when I wanted to get in the bathtub first and she wouldn't let me. She may have been older but I was definitely stronger! So...I usually leave it at that, because if anyone knows what I put Troy through on a daily basis, it's them.

Now throw pregnancy hormones into the mix....he doesn't stand a chance. I'm not your typical emotional woman who cries for no reason. I'm more of the slapping (think Rachael McAdams in the Notebook...not so much Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction), hitting, throwing my shoes at your head breed. I don't cry because I'm sad, I cry when I am angry.

And when Troy asked me to take the dog for a walk last night and THEN had the nerve to tell me that I need to clean the counter top...it was all over. I went nuts cleaning and telling him that I am getting ahead of the game so that there's nothing left for him to demand that I do! By the time he decided to stop me I was already out of breath from running around like a mad woman with a 20-pound sack of laundry over my shoulder. He told me to put it down and go take a bath (the medicine-free cure all...and he knows it). But before the tub was full I was running back into the living room and melted into his arms crying and apologizing (you know it was bad if I was apologizing!).

He laid with me nose-to-nose for half an hour and listened to my every fear of not being a good enough mother. (He even put a relaxation CD on and turned out the lights....so sweet). Will I be like my aunt and grandmother? I never want to make my kid(s) feel the way that my dad and cousin felt growing up, waiting for their ticking-time-bomb mom to go off at any minute. Will I be able to control my temper and develop a longer fuse? Am I too selfish to be a mother? What if there's not enough of me to take care of a family and work a full time job?

I guess this was my way of telling Troy that while most of me is thrilled about being a mother and confident that I will be a good one, I'm scared too. And I needed to know that he is as committed and emotionally involved in this process as I am. I just have a funny way of presenting this to him.

I assumed that because I am not an overly emotional person that I would be above the weepy and hormonal pregnant woman stereotype, but clearly I'm not! I just express it in a different way. And maybe Troy would prefer that I was your average run-of-the-mill pregnant lady, at least it would be a lot less painful for him...