On September 21, Delphine turned six months old. She celebrated by cutting her first tooth, down on her lower front gum, and complaining loudly about it. But when she’s not suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous teething, she likes to giggle. A lot.
When you’re a new mom, everybody always asks, “So, are you getting any sleep?”
Well, yes and no. Yes, I get sleep — usually several hours a night, in fact. But no, I’m not getting the lovely eight hours straight of yesteryear, because there’s generally at least one midnight trip to the nursery for a snack session. Breaking up the sleep cycle with an hour of wakeful activity does not for an overall restful night make.
Some mommies suffer from pregnesia, or brain fade while pregnant. Other mommies — most of ‘em? — suffer from mommy brain, which is basically the same thing, just post-partum. (Although at least one writer begs to differ, claiming that having babies actually makes women smarter.)
The short definition? A new mommy’s brain simply doesn’t work the way it used to.
It’s not just the fatigue, which is very different from the somnolence of, say, my journalism class in high school (yawn). You don’t necessarily feel sleepy; you feel tired, which isn’t the same thing.
Neither does the brain feel sludgy in the way that, say, a boring summer office job induces; it’s not the atrophy of understimulation.
Rather, “mommy brain” is the diagnosis for when you make the discomfiting discovery that, while you might feel mostly normal, you’re not.
How do you know? Frequently, mommy brain manifests in the form of aphasia, or fumbling around for a word you know you know but suddenly can’t remember. And since mommy brain afflicts daddies, too, you can have conversations like this one:
Caleb: Hey, Delphine is watching the cars go back and forth on the street! Pretty smart, huh?
Caroline: Well, smarter than the drivers, at any rate. Isn’t that the same red car going up and down the street? Maybe they’re lost.
Caleb: Nah, the cars are different.
Caroline: How can you tell?
Caleb: Because the cars have different thingies on them.
Caroline: Thingies?
Caleb: Yeah, like the logo of the car company on the front of the car. The medallions.
Caroline: Medallions? You mean, like the things rappers used to wear around their necks?
Caleb: Exactly. What are those things called again?
Caroline: I forget, but “medallions” is a pretty cool word for them.
And so forth. It took us the rest of the day, in fact, to recall that the technical term we had lost was hood ornament. But now we prefer rapper medallions.
