It seems there has been much research in recent years on the subject of how motherhood affects one’s brain.
Of course, the scientific experiments were conducted within the walls of a sterile laboratory rather than the domestic world of mismatched socks and refrigerators where new strains of penicillin frequently wait to be discovered.
The good news is that contrary to what some of us have long believed about our shrinking intelligence quotient, it is now a proven fact that motherhood actually does make us smarter! That’s the good news. The bad news is that much of the conclusive information was extracted from rats. Somehow, that takes a little of the luster off the shine for me.
I ran across an old book on my bookshelf this week.
I remember buying it years ago after I watched the author’s interview on one of the morning shows. The title of the book is The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter. I checked the internet just to be sure it is still in print.
Since it is, I assume the topic is still relevant. The question put to author Katherine Ellison was, “Were you afraid your brain would suffer after you had children?” What a question to ask a mother. Suffering brains come and go for most of us – depends on the age of one’s children, what the current crisis is, and the amount of sleep we may or may not have had lately.
For years I have been aware of my own attention deficit, memory loss, and anxiety.
I used to blame it on caffeine, stress, or fatigue, but I now blame “senior moments.” Not so according to Ellison. Studies point to a disease called Prolonged Post-Partum Memory Impairment. It seems there is no statute of limitations on post-partum conditions.
This particular one can be permanent. Next time I fill out one of those infamous medical history patient information forms, I am going to insert those words in the space marked “other.” Call it the gift that keeps on giving.
Even so, Ellison’s book reveals two or three pluses for every minus in what we perceive as “mommy brain.” “Mommy brain” forgets where she parked the car ten minutes ago or whether or not she mailed the envelope to the IRS last April, but she can tell you in a New York minute which child likes his sandwich in triangles, which one never eats mayonnaise, and which one gets a window seat three years from now when the family van pulls out of the driveway for vacation.
Mommy brains are the masters of multi-tasking and time-management — you know they can stir the spaghetti, talk on the cell phone, and hold a fussy toddler on one hip all at the same time. They are walking encyclopedias on topics from what communicable disease is making its way around the preschool, to which third grade teacher is best with boys, to how many minutes it takes to get from the driveway to the school door in morning traffic.
The days are long, but it is so true that the years are short. In retrospect, it all goes by so fast.
I remember praying that my firstborn would just please sleep through the night. For the first two months of his life, his cries meant I stumbled into his room at 2 a.m. to search in the dark, of course, for the missing pacifier and to rock him while we both sobbed uncontrollably. I thought it would never end.
And I admit there were moments I wondered why motherhood ever seemed like a great idea. Fortunately for both of us, he did not come with a return receipt.
Stephen Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and the guru of more time management books and life skill tools than most anyone else, said that in every endeavor, “Begin with the end in mind.”
The hardest thing in being a mom is to live that theory. In the midst of sleepless nights or the stomach virus, it is so hard to focus on the “end in mind” – because the future seems a lifetime away. That distant goal is a child who becomes an adult who IS all the things you hoped he’d be – and what is more all the things God planned for him to become. It’s so easy in the seemingly endless day after day after day to forget what that end goal is or even that there is an end goal!
Mommy brain? It’s about wisdom, and there is just one place to find that. It’s on your knees and in the Good Book.
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.
Proverbs 22:6
