Nappy Brain
Yes, I was concerned I'd lose my mind to a world of nappies and sleep deprivation. In fact, a few weeks after my baby was born I completely shut down the 'work/career' part of my brain. Not easy to do when you run your own business. I truly cringed when the phone rang when I knew it was my staff calling me for a daily report. I just didn't want to know. To be honest, I didn't even care what went on at the office. Then it hit me that I had realised my fear. I traded in my brain for a new baby.
I started to notice that people expect you to be "less smart" after you have children. For instance you could be sitting around with a group of women and someone would say something silly and laugh it off as 'baby brain'. Trivial as it may sound, it can make you feel as though you're going to accomplish less in life as a mother than you otherwise might if you continued on without children. It can shake your confidence.
And, if this is your first child, your confidence is a fragile thing. One day you are the best mummy in the world. Baby is feeding right, going to sleep easily and generally content. The next day it goes horribly wrong. Baby is still crying when it has slept, eaten and has a clean nappy on. You're left racking your brain trying to remember all the advice in the books you read when you were pregnant. How is that at the office you can lead a team of 10 but right now at home you can't please a human who only weighs 5 kilos?
Of course, some laboratory has researched this on rats. So are we smarter or dummer after babies. Well, mother rats were smarter, specifically in learning and memory capacity, than rats that never had babies. Does this make us feel any better or are you thinking "great, now rats are smarter than me?" But rest assured, we mummies have an edge. According to one article I read, the brain-boosting benefits of motherhood can be broken down into five attributes: increased perception, efficiency, resiliency, motivation, and emotional intelligence.
The most interesting to me is the first category, perception. This deals with our five senses. Did you know that studies show pregnant women has sharper visual acuity than women who weren't expecting. That doesn't mean they could just throw out their glasses but in fact, they did notice a lot more. So there you have it. Our own mothers did have eyes at the back of their head!
Other findings show that mothers can experience a boost in motivation, fearlessness, and the ability to multi-task (der!) and cope with stress. There's also exciting new research suggesting that oxytocin, a hormone important to labor and breastfeeding, improves mums' capacity for learning and memory.
Emotional intelligence is probably the clearest category in which mothers benefit, though. One of the biggest brain boosts for mums is the ability to see the world through someone else's eyes. So now watching the 6 o'clock news can be harrowing. We think to ourselves "what if that was my child ?"
Maybe, our empathy for others may only come to us clearly when we are mothers ourselves. Now how can that be considered stupid?