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  Because I have to have 500 characters in order not to delete the chapter I am now just going to type a string of text.

  Because I have to have 500 characters in order not to delete the chapter I am now just going to type a string of text.

  First Studding

  Age: 23

  -Mary Sue

  -Xaxac Jr

  -Unnamed child that died in infancy

  Second Studding

  Age 22

  -Bunni

  -Sonny

  -Honey

  -Unnamed child who died before Xac found him

  With Sharon

  Age: 18

  -Garon

  -Sokomaur

  -Lapus

  -Solomaur

  Age: 11

  -Gareth

  -Abraham

  -Abigale

  -Belle

  Age: 5

  -Harvey

  -Angel

  -Frank

  -Alice

  You may notice that people reference other people with these names when they are very clearly not talking about the Brigaddon children. When Xac talks about "Lapus" here, a Lapus that he has not seen in years, he's not talking about the son he saw earlier that same evening, he's talking about a different Lapus- someone he was, at one time, close enough with to name his child after them. The same goes for "Big Gary" whom Xac would trust with his life but not his children, and "Ronnie and Soko" who had the baby Gary lost. These are a completely different Gareth, Garon, and Sokomaur, whom Xac has named his children after.

  I don't see this very often in books and I dislike it, because this is a pretty standard naming convention in the real world. People tend to know, from context, which person with the same name you're talking about. There are actually a bunch of articles I read saying not to do this, because it confuses readers, but... I really don't think it should, and I actually like the added layers it brings. That confusion is not always a bad thing, because that's a realthing that happens in the real world. People do get confused, there is misscommunication because of shared names.

  I said earlier that I didn't want to spoil any background for Sharon because it would be revealed slowly, and we get a taste of that here. We now know that she was raised in a cult called the Kabaal led by a man named Shabeel that focuses on a "me and mine" mentality, and that Xac somehow betrayed it, despite being descended from Quizlivan Brigaddon, which apparently meant something within the cult. Sharon is worried for her son Lapus because his mindset reminds her of her time in the Kabaal. But, she seems to have that mindset very, very deeply conditioned, so it's entirely possible that she's seeing things that aren't there and it really is, as Xac suggested, just teenage hormones and she's overreacting. This theory of Xaaxc being right is compounded by Sharon's pregnancy, as during pregnancy many people experience mood swings, sometimes so severe that it is mistaken for bipolar personality disorder.

  I mean it's neither here nor there but pregnancy is an unknowable hellscape for the person experiencing it, so if you know someone who is pregnant cut them some slack and try to make life as easy for them as possible. It's not just the mood swings, it's also sickness, fatigue, someone kicking the shit out of you from the inside, diareah/constipation, you have to piss every five minutes, your feet swell, you can't sleep- it's the worst. And people come up and randomly tell you how goddamn horrible it is for no reason. Like literally random old ladies walk up like, "Bet you threw your guts up. Bet you ain't slept in a week. Hey did you know that when you're pushing the kid out you'll shit yourself?" Idk... why people feel the need to do that. Like strangers will do that. It's weird and kinda not cool. But the trade off is that you go through that hell and then you get a baby, so it's worth it.

  So I guess the PSA here is never try to make a pregnant person do a goddamn thing because they'll kill you and no jury in the world will convict you. People are out here throwing microwave ovens and turkeys at folks and you just gotta shrug it off because like... they're allowed to do that, they're pregnant.

  Pregnancy is something else I rarely see covered well in media. It seems to take a few forms, neither of which are particularly accurate. Either the pregnant person is a delicate flower incapable of doing anything and therefore locked away from the plot until the baby is born, or they just... don't have any of the symptoms or issues associated with pregnancy and just keep going as normal until they go into labor and everyone is like, "Oh right! You were pregnant!"

  That ain't how that shit works. Real pregnancy has real symptoms that need to be addressed. They're not life-ruining, but they are a thing. You can do most of the stuff you normally do while you're pregnant, but you can't just ignore the pregnancy. There's a balance, in the really real world, that you have to take into account. I'm told that you get better at the balance with each subseqent child, so Sharon's probably pretty good at it by now, but that the first one really knocks you on your ass. I mentioned before that my mamaw had 13 kids (she had significantly more pregnancies, but you know, miscarriage and infant mortality rates are pretty high around here, especially in the 40s) and she's talked about this a lot, about how it does get easier if you keep at it. Most folks in my generation ain't really interested in keeping at it, but I did interview a lot of older women who did have a large number of pregnancies, and did a lot of research to find out how that kind of acclimitization happens psychologically.

  Every pregnancy is different, and Sharon's is actually not going to be the only pregnancy in Xren, but it is the first one that you folks see. So just keep in mind that I'm doing my best to present it accurately, especially in terms of psychology with the chemical changes that happen in your brain. People really do just fly into uncontrollable rages and beat the shit out of somebody, as we saw Sharon do to Lapus, and it really does suck. Hormones are not an excuse for abuse, but mood and control are influenced by real chemical changes. And there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it because most mood stabalizers are not approved for pregnant patients. In fact, if you have a mood disorder and you're on stabalizers, you have to wean off them and stay off them FOR THE DURATION OF THE PREGNANCY and possibly for the time you plan to breastfeed.

  I really hope that at least one person reading this knows what I'm talking about and is like #relatable.

  So I do want to mention one more thing here about pregnancy and then I'll stop. This is a book intended for adult audiences who know when characters are making a bad decision and would know that something like smoking while pregnant, which Sharon does here, is not cool. But please remember that this is a fantasy realm with a level of technology that roughly mirrors what we saw at the beginning of the industrial revolution, as in, most things are done by hand, but there are factories and whatnot. Their technology paints a world that is somewhat similar to ours in the 1800s. The first peer reviewed study linking tobacco use to fetal impairment was published in the 1940s, and the general population would not believe it for another twenty years. It was not uncommon, even in the 60s, to see folks smoking while pregnant because they simply did not believe the research. But prior to several inventions in prenatal care that we now take for granted such as sonograms and an ability to take fetal samples to test for abnomolies, there was simply no way to know which teterogens were harmful. People didn't know that what they were doing was bad. So Sharon's not necissarily being a bad mother here to her unborn child, she genuienly doesn't know she's not supposed to smoke while pregnant.

  But like real talk, PSA, don't smoke while you're pregnant.