Mommy Brain

Mommy Brain

If you’ve left the crayons to melt in the car,
And forgotten just where the car keys are,
There’s a perfectly good way to explain:
You see, you’ve come down with “Mommy Brain.”

When you’re not sure where the past 8 hours went,
Or whether the phone bill check’s been sent,
If you’ve left the laundry drying in the rain,
It’s just–you guessed it–Mommy Brain.

If you find yourself chatting for hours on end
About diaper prices with your cyberfriends,
You’ve just caught a particularly virulent strain
Of that affliction known as Mommy Brain.

If you left your bags at the grocery store
Or completely forgot what you went there for,
If you called the cat by your baby’s name,
You can bet that Mommy Brain’s to blame.

And if you know the words to “Goodnight Moon” by heart,
Or you study your sleeping babe like a work of art,
If you’re always surprised by how time is flying,
And the thought of that first birthday starts you crying…..

It’s unavoidable girls, and I feel your pain,
For I, too, suffer from Mommy Brain.
But I’ll admit one thing–of this I’m sure:
I hope they never find a cure.

©1998 Carlotta Stankiewicz

How many of you recognise the symptoms of Mommy Brain in yourselves? I know I have many, and now that I’m pregnant with #2, the symptoms seem to have worsened. For instance, I’m in the church choir and we often sing the songs from memory, without lyric sheets. This weekend, I kept forgetting that a line in a song that we sang was “on wings like eagles” and not “like wings on eagles”. Singing the latter made no sense at all in the context of the previous line, but it took me three services to get it right. Worse, I told my choir mates about my inability to sing the right line, and “infected” them with the wrong lyrics.

I’ve also noticed other things, like forgetting where I put things and generally being a scatterbrain. I’m not usually like this, but Mommy Brain is really getting to me. That’s why I hope Katherine Ellison is right when she says mothers actually get smarter after having babies in her book “The Mommy Brain”. ‘Cos you know, it wouldn’t do to have my already-insubstantial mental capacities fall even further.