VANCOUVER – Sarah Jenkins, 32, who is seven months pregnant with her first child, has reportedly had some difficulty adjusting to a strange new symptom: colleagues, acquaintances, and even strangers being bafflingly nice to her.
“The first time some teenager got up and offered their seat to me on the bus, I thought it was some kind of trap,” Jenkins told reporters. “Like, why would he just give up a seat? He saw I was tired and an easy mark? What’s his angle? Like I sit down on the seat and then it breaks and he films it and puts it on TikTok?”
“And then I remembered, ooooh, I’m pregnant. People are nice to pregnant ladies. Cool.”
Along with many symptoms like nausea, dizziness, fatigue and back pain, unexpected friendliness and concern began to crop up for Jenkins early in her term.
“The first time I noticed it was actually when I had a second piece of lasagne and my mom didn’t say anything about how you have to really watch your calorie intake after 30. I was super weirded out, and then it hit me, I’m pregnant! Nobody’s going to give me unsolicited weight loss advice for another six months!”
“It’s almost as weird and unexpected as that time in the second trimester when we turned the A/C on and my nipples turned completely inside out,” she added.
While like many pregnancy symptoms, unexplained kindness has not been thoroughly studied, anthropologists have chalked it up to an ancient instinct.
“Normally, when you see a stranger, your first instinct is ‘Danger! What is that thing! It’s going to steal my food! Kill it! Kill!,’ Dr. Bertram Grim told reporters. “But when you see a pregnant person, your response is more likely to be, ‘You are my mother,’ or ‘Your tummy is me,’ or even ‘I am you because you are tummy and tummy is me.’”
Although data collection is scarce, anecdotal accounts on sites like Reddit suggest that the symptom may not be limited to Jenkins.
“My came over to my desk and I was sure he was going to ask me to come in over the weekend,” one user reported. “But then he just asked me if “I wanted to to home a little early,” because “I looked tired and there’s a flu going around, and he didn’t want me to get sick.”
“It was like he saw me as a person. It was almost as crazy as that time I sat down to pee and the smell of my own vagina made me vomit.”
