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No wonder
my children are so creative, and I was under the impression they inherited their creativity and intelligence from me. I'll have to tell their mother about this and she can then throw away the pills. All jokes aside, my wife was no more irrational while pregnant than usual. I suspect some women use these "old wives tales" to gain territory in the power balance in a marriage. Mine was actually sweet and didn't make the kind of weird demands some of our friends made when they were pregnant. Interesting stuff, I should invest in some downers and become more creative.
posted by
AardigeAfrikaner
on October 15, 2008 at 1:22 AM
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i didn't have any morning sickness - i just ate everything I saw!!! but you are right about creativity - how can someone sing the blues if their life has been a dream.
posted by
ladychardonnay
on October 11, 2008 at 8:38 AM
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Re:
Thank you for sharing this. That sounds like an interesting study. I'll have to read more about that. There is a recent study, also mentioned in the press, about a link between mental illness, specifically depression and bipolar disorder, and creativity. Creative people have higher incidence of both conditions. And deep introspection seems to be a strong predictor of depression. So I'm in real trouble. Again.
My wife didn't like being pregnant, either. For one thing, she had 'morning sickness' all day for the first seven months in the first pregnancy. And then she had a tendency to bleed during delivery, so I wasn't willing to risk her life trying for another child.
posted by
mousehop
on October 11, 2008 at 8:19 AM
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Re: mousehop
As far as I remember, the study didn't mention Canadian women, American women, Israeli women, or Palestinian women. Is it safe to extrapolate physiological findings across political boundaries?
posted by
mousehop
on October 11, 2008 at 8:14 AM
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Re: "Return to normalcy." as in not pregnant?
The title was meant somewhat ironically, because the study shows that pregnancy is normal, and doesn't affect cognitive function, as had been believed, apparently, by someone with enough influence to make it worth studying. Or maybe it was a popular belief. After all, the word 'hysterectomy', removing the uterus, has the same root as hysteria, and that's not a coincidence.
It will be some time before women are truly treated as equal to men in American thought, but I think we are making progress. This study might help.
posted by
mousehop
on October 11, 2008 at 8:13 AM
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i felt more physically vulnerable when i was pregnant and certainly less attractive. some women enjoy being pregnant but i don't. i also suffered from post-partum depression when I had my third child that developed into clinical depression that landed me in the hospital. My daughter and I were involved in "The Toddler Project" at the University of Pittsburgh. They used control toddlers and toddlers who were raised by depressed mothers. Their findings were that the the children of depressed mothers were more independent / had a wider vocabulary / and wre able to perform physical tasks of much older children. But that was done in 1997 so who knows what they know now.
posted by
ladychardonnay
on October 11, 2008 at 7:57 AM
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"Return to normalcy." as in not pregnant?
Well, some might say that pregnancy is a normal state of being, with perhaps a heightened creative purpose. When I was pregnant I felt invulnerable, strong, that nothing could hurt me. It may have been the hormones. Why do men ask if women are smarter during pregnancy than otherwise? Nobody asks if men are smarter when they're involved with something creative, like, say, putting together a piece of furniture from Ikea or something. Sheesh!
posted by
Pat_B
on October 11, 2008 at 5:25 AM
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mousehop
Oh, you're speaking of
Australian women? That explains it...
(Okay, I know I'm a marked man now! But I have my female bodyguards, just like Moammar Ghadafi, so don't try anything, ladies...
)
posted by
Nautikos
on October 10, 2008 at 7:03 PM
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