Have I Got Baby Brain?

It’s 5pm on a Monday. We walk in the park, Bean napping in a carrier. She has the crappiest naps today, no longer then 30 minutes, and I am worried for her brain development. Surely that can’t be good? On the other hand, she slept almost thirteen hours at night with a quick wake up for a snack in the middle, so perhaps crappy naps is a price you pay for excellent night sleep.

The city is in the first flashes of autumn with the trees turning red and yellow. We are standing on a hill overlooking Prague, with the sun hanging low. I tell Fredrik about the Mendeleev’s table. He doesn’t know what it is, I forget the word periodic and it takes me some time to explain it. I tell him chances that we discover a new common element are practically zero. The elements are arranged in order of increasing atomic number, from 1 (hydrogen) to 118 (oganesson), with only 90 of them occurring naturally on Earth—it’s all rather elegant. The conversation (a rather one-sided one) shifts to math, if it was invented or discovered, to the theory of linguistic relativity, to dinner, should we order Vietnamese or cook the the chicken, did I forget to close the window or not, and finally and—logically—to the aliens. Bean is still sleeping, finally longer than 30 minutes, and I try to explain that perhaps alien life exists in the dimensions outside of our comprehension, let’s order pork belly, by the way. We can understand 2D even though we live in 3D world plus time, so maybe they live in 4 or 5D. Sure, Fredrik says. Did you sleep well? I can see he doesn’t really follow my train of thought, and to be fair the conversation does luck a connecting thread. I complain to him I completely lost the ability to have a conversation. When we play scrabble I can only come up with four letter words. I also did not close the window.

This is a real problem of late. “You have got baby brain,” he says. I think for a moment of I should be offended or not. I think not?

I have no particular interest in the royal family but even I remember the incident involving Meghan and Kate. According to an excerpt from Spare, Meghan once joked that Kate had “baby brain” after she said she’d forgotten something minor, which led Kate—then newly postpartum—to demand an apology (?) during a reconciliation meeting. “We are not close enough for you to talk about my hormones,” she allegedly said. What? I am not a princess, of course, but I would talk about my hormones with the guy in a kebab shop if he asked. Only that my favourite kebab place is now a barber shop, and that’s another problem of late. Everything is changing, and I can’t remember anything, and my sentences make no sense, and where should I get my kebab now? Like the change of motherhood wasn’t enough. Of course, they did offer me free dürüm when I was not yet pregnant and passing by wearing sundresses, and I surely wasn’t the only one, so no wonder they had to close, what kind of business practice is that.

I am not the only one who forgets things. Pregnancy and early motherhood are often described as periods of foggy thinking, forgetfulness, and mental scatter—symptoms colloquially referred to as “baby brain,” “mommy brain” or “momnesia” (horrific). Pretty much every single one of my girlfriends confirms—they too had the paralizing inability to gather thought in one way or another.

No one can argue that pregnancy induces profound hormonal and neurological transformations. Studies using MRI scans (there are quote a few of them) have shown that women’s brains actually change in structure during pregnancy. Research published in Nature Neuroscience (2016) found that grey matter volume decreases in areas associated with social cognition and emotional processing—not as a loss of function, but as a fine-tuning process. Apparently, these changes help mothers better understand and respond to their infants’ needs, suggesting that the brain becomes more specialised rather than less capable—it’s comforting to hear.

Hormones like estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin also play a key role. They surge dramatically during pregnancy and influence brain regions involved in memory, attention, and emotion. While these fluctuations can temporarily affect cognitive performance, they also prepare the brain for maternal behaviours and bonding. And don’t even get me started on all the hormonal fuckery associated with breastfeeding. The other day, I was telling my girlfriend how bad I felt emotionally about inability to breastfeed even though rationally I knew it was not that big of a deal: I can pump, I can feed my baby formula, I can even buy donor milk—all the options mothers of yore did not have (what they did have was kids who didn’t reject their boobs!!!). “I understand you,” she said. “When I stopped breastfeeding at six month, I thought I was going to die. It was worse than baby blues.”

Mommy brain, baby blues—the language around it is important, and perhaps we ought to change it. Maybe Kate was right to be upset? A decrease in grey matter volume doesn’t mean a loss of intelligence or brain power. Instead, it reflects neural pruning, the brain fine-tuning itself to become more efficient, especially in areas linked to empathy, emotional understanding, and caregiving. It’s similar to how adolescent brains refine their neural connections during puberty.

Magdalena Fournillier

I still read a ton, I listen to audiobook while on long walks with Bean and actually grasp what I hear, I write on average a thousand words per day, more than I have ever written. Recently I also started to work again, and while I space out occasionally (who doesn’t when you stare at the screen for hours?), it’s going pretty well. My “baby brain” manifests itself primarily in conversations, it’s like I completely lost the ability to think while on the go, and forgetting little tasks that have not much to do with the bigger picture. Is it shrunken grey matter or simply fatigue, stress, and the overwhelming mental load that accompanies early motherhood? Juggling it all on little sleep can make anyone feel cognitively taxed. Even if there were no changes in the brain, changes in the life would be enough to make anyone feel less organised.

I pause and watch a group of teenagers pass by, their laughter echoing down the hill. I smell weed and try to imagine what they think when they see me. Probably not much. They’re too busy being young and invincible.

Still, I don’t think I’ve become duller. I am still bloody delightful. Would you not love to talk aliens with me on a Monday evening? It’s just the part of my brain that used to connect threads now catalogues nap lengths, feeding intervals, and the precise tone of Bean’s “I’m tired” cry versus “I’m hungry.” It is intelligence of its own—or so I tell myself.