“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve blamed ‘baby brain’ for something over the past few years,” says Kayleigh Dray, writer and mother of two. “The time I absent-mindedly put my phone in the fridge, for example, or hopped on the wrong train and wound up miles from home. When I forgot my pin and locked my card. So silly! So funny! So baby brain of me!
“I laugh moments like these off, but they can feel frightening. It’s as if my body has been taken over by a stranger and I’ve only just wrested back the controls. But, while my so-called baby brain is all too happy to drop the ball on stuff like this, it’s the complete opposite when it comes to everything else. I’m forever keeping track of lunch bags and water bottles and ever-changing shoe sizes, applying SPF, factoring naps and nappy changes and potty breaks into my day, remembering favourite books and snacks and stories, knowing all the little ways to soothe each of them best and serving three meals a day (plus snacks) to the toddler – despite not having time myself to eat.
“I am all at once lighter and darker than I have ever been, jovially writing off huge lapses in memory as baby brain while listening to myself preach on and on about the dangers of marshmallows for under-fives whenever my toddler so much as looks at one. And I cry, too, much more than I ever did. Because I’m happy, because I’m overwhelmed with love, because my toddler is cuddling her baby sister so sweetly, because that episode of Bluey felt so relatable, because I’m up all night feeding and it feels so lonely in the dark sometimes.
“Thankfully, though, it turns out I’m not alone. A new study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience captures one woman’s cognitive evolution into motherhood by taking repeated brain scans over three years. While the superhighways between white matter strengthened during pregnancy and reverted back to normal after birth, the cortex (aka the wrinkly outer area of her brain) shrank and thinned, and remained that way forever. Despite that sounding like a bad thing, it’s actually the opposite: it’s an example of how magnificent our brains really are, pruning and reshaping to make themselves more efficient for the mammoth task of parenthood ahead.
“We should stop giving our baby brains such a bad rap, then, and instead praise them for equipping us with the skills we need to juggle the seemingly endless stream of flaming torches we’re tossed haphazardly as parents. Because Old Me – the one who remembered her phone number but had no clue how to navigate a toddler meltdown in Morrisons – would have zero chance of surviving this rollercoaster without her newly shrunken cortex.”
