It’s the Pitts: Baa…d Moo…d

by Lee Pitts

Today we discuss a very delicate subject – women.

I feel sorry for females. I sincerely do. They have to undergo nine months of craving pickles, experiencing the excruciating pain of trying to pass a basketball through a grapefruit-sized hole and then do most of the major lifting in raising the resulting child. 

I haven’t even mentioned ballooning in size so she looks like she’s got a soccer ball under her shirt which also kicks like a soccer player. 

And the average American mother repeats the entire process all over again, averaging 2.07 kids, while all the father has to do is pass out cigars and accept congratulations. 

So who can blame a woman for the occasional bad mood, irritability, territorial behavior, becoming a little testy or transforming into a raging lunatic?

As a kid, I was always told it was a fair deal – the women raised the kids while the men went off to war. But 84.3 percent of females have had a biological child while only 6.1 percent of males serve in the military and a large percentage of them never see combat. 

And 56.8 percent of women not only have to experience the pain of childbirth but go back to work soon after. 

Our government calls moms who don’t enter the workforce “non-working women,” but I contend there is no such thing. It’s almost as bad as days of old when a woman gave birth in the back of a covered wagon in the morning and was expected to cook dinner that night.

Does this sound like a fair deal to you?

The biggest enemies of motherhood are hormones like estrogen, progesterone, prolactin, oxytocin, uteininizing hormone, follical stimulating hormone (FSH), relaxin, human chorionic gonadotropin hormone (HCG) and so on. 

They are all engaged in a nine-month biochemical tug of war in the pregnant female’s brain and body, and there’s not one “happy hormone” amongst them. Even after the baby is born these hormones are not done terrorizing and tormenting.

I know about all of this stuff because I’ve raised a lot of cows and sheep – not that I’m equating cows with human moms, mind you. Do you think I’m crazy? The last thing I’d want to do is invite the ire of the 5,359,550 pregnant women in this country who are subject to extreme mood swings and are also handy with a baseball bat.

Here’s an animal example to make my point. 

We purchased a heifer at the county fair that would eat alfalfa cubes out of your hand, appreciated a good neck massage and was so sweet, we called her Angel. But as her pregnancy progressed, Angel turned into the devil. 

Try to feed her out of your hand and she’d run right over the top of you and eat YOUR lunch. Try to get close enough to rub her neck, and she’d kick like a mule. 

She plowed right through a five-wire fence just so she could upend my horse Gentleman who had previously enjoyed a peaceful relationship with her. From then on Gentleman was never the same and approached every cow as if she were pregnant, which is actually not a bad policy with people too.

Then there were the 20 bred cows I bought on a whim one day at the auction because they were super cheap. They were Holsteins carrying Angus embryos. I thought I’d get a decent calf and then sell the cows and make a little money, but they were absolutely the worst cows to ever set foot on the place. 

When they calved, every single one took one look at the hairball trying to attack their flanks and ran away with Secretariat-like speed. I never did get one to accept her calf, and our barn was filled with hungry calves. 

I had made the mistake of expecting those cows to use nature’s own formula in feeding their calves with the idea being “as long as you got ‘em, you might as well use ‘em.” But the cows, who’d never had contact with their offspring before had other ideas, all because man has intervened in the hormone hostilities in the Holstein brain.

And don’t get me started on the horrible “horror-mones” at work in the sheep’s brain – or lack thereof.