Monster Brain
Up with my new baby in the middle of the night, I’m aimlessly scrolling and I read a random article suggesting asking your partner questions like “What is the best gift you’ve ever gotten?” or “What’s your best memory from early childhood?” I try to think how I would answer—but when I search my memories, my mind is a dark, empty well. I try again, throwing my consciousness harder, like a coin. But the coin never hits water, or earth.
Your brain does shrink when you have a baby. Gray matter itself reduces. Sometimes, the loss is almost 7%, a level of loss that typically occurs only in traumatic brain injury. Hence the term “mommy brain”—so cute, Mommy can’t perform basic tasks—adorable! But a writer I hear on NPR claims this idea is overblown, insulting; that plenty of women go back to work after they have a baby, and they do just fine. I too find the idea of mommy brain infantilizing, but I am also astounded that other people are doing fine, and wonder what’s wrong with me.
The gray matter does shrink, but other parts of the brain light up more. New pathways form between parts of the brain, a literal rewiring.
This is what I remind myself when I cannot remember simple words. When I put a bag of shredded cheese in the junk drawer. When unloading the dishwasher feels like a task I can never be capable of, when I cry because I forgot an ingredient for dinner. When my sister comes to visit the baby and deep cleans my kitchen so much that I’m embarrassed. When I become an asshole, thinking so much about the baby I forget important birthdays, or forget to ask people about their own lives.
It seems the baby has filled every space in my brain, overtaken it completely. That is what fetal DNA does—DNA from my daughter will linger in my bone marrow, blood, brain, and yes, of course, the heart. Fetal DNA has even been found in the brains of women who had their children decades ago, as old as 94. In a study with mice, when a new mother experienced heart failure, her baby’s fetal DNA molded itself into cardiac tissue, and rushed in to help her regrow a portion of damaged heart. Scientists believe this likely happens with humans, too. This process is called microchimerism. A chimera, microscopic.
The chimera from ancient Greek mythology was a female with the head of a lion, the body of a goat (and sometimes the head, too), and instead of a lion’s tail, another head—this one of a serpent. She breathed fire. She could destroy you three different ways. And the chimera did destroy—she was evil, leveling homes, murdering innocent people. The chimera was invincible. She could’ve been a god. But she wasn’t. The chimera was also a bad omen—sometimes she appeared before a natural disaster. But what disaster could be worse than her? Was she lion, goat, or serpent? I say that, with so many parts, a chimera is no one.
My worst fear was that I would lose myself completely when the baby was born. I worried that my whole life would be diapers wipes baby crying breastfeeding shit sleep me crying naps breastfeeding and I didn’t want that. I wanted to be myself, plus a child. Maybe holding hands, but separate. I did not want my self to be my child, a patchwork of bits and pieces of my old self hidden away, a monster with dark circles beneath her eyes, snapping at people that she was just so fucking tired.
I watched the way my own mother still watched me, do you want a blanket, are you cold, are you hungry, can I get you a glass of water, me wanting to say yes just to make her happy, even though I could get my own damn blanket. Me still her baby though I am 34. It was an extraordinary love, but it was one that seemed like it could destroy her, maybe already had.
But of course, my daughter needed me, and I was there, there, there, there, and nowhere else. It felt good to change a diaper, to breastfeed, to see a clear need and fix it for the moment, to care so deeply that I offered my body again and again. I learned how exhausting it was to be so hypervigilant, your body a tuning fork to the cries/heartbeat/breath/shiver of another. Could I stand a lifetime of it? I wasn’t sure I could. I worried my self would be destroyed, my creativity with it. No, not be destroyed—I worried I was destroying myself, my former self extinguished, doused completely like a candle in water.
Where has my former self gone? When a flame is put out what happens to it? Matter never disappears; the flame becomes smoke becomes air. A well always has a bottom, somewhere, no matter how deep. One day I am trying to do a few of the piled up dishes while my baby naps and then time slips and I am back sledding down the hill at the middle school as a child; I am me but someone else; 8 years old and the snow is very cold on her face, saying what she always said then: this hill is perfect, steep enough to go fast, not so steep you’re too tired to climb back up again; but then she is 14 on a dock and the waves are splashing into the scummy poles beneath her body, the sun is burning and sweat slides off her scalp into her ears but she doesn’t mind, the waves are music, her cousins talking nearby are as warm as the sun, her body feels flat and good. The memory closes itself like a light put out and I am still at my sink, hands soapy. The returned memory sings, a shiny coin returned to its place.
I look at my daughter’s face and I think I might have the whole thing memorized, the tiny nose, the rosy cheeks, the long lashes, one eye that tears in the sun and in the wind, a freckle over each eyebrow, hands so small they have dimples instead of knuckles, one hand with a dry patch, half-moon fingernails always too sharp, ears perfect, perfect. I look in the mirror and see my same old face—more lines, I think, more gray hair—but the same. And yet, I look and wonder whose it is. I am a new animal to myself. I look for a lion’s mane, a serpent’s tail.
I make grocery lists and I forget what I want to buy before I can write it down. Little mommy, look at her dumb little brain, adorable. I’m watching Netflix while I cook and I forget to watch the knife and my hand too, I nearly cut my fingers off.
I’m feeding the baby and then my former self is there in my head, riding her bike to the party store to get ice cream She careens down the hill toward the main road, so steep it thrills with a tiny terror, but she knows which way to look for cars, and it’s so quiet she can hear them long before she sees them. Most of what she hears is the long, dry grass at the edge of the road, the buzz of the insects happy it’s a hot summer, the buzz of her tires on the pavement. At the party store she digs a strawberry shortcake bar out from the cooler. She pays for it with some change and sits on the concrete step outside to eat it. It’s very hot, but she doesn’t spill a drop of ice cream. She feels very grown up. I blink and I’m changing the baby and another former self flashes into my head, at her sixth birthday party, everyone wearing hula skirts and leis, green plastic sticking to her legs. She’s chasing everyone because she’s It. But she’s too tired and she can’t catch anyone. She can’t keep up.
Eventually I go back to work, and in meetings I forget that I’ve met people before, I cannot keep names straight, don’t really give a shit about much on my to-do list that isn’t my daughter. Then I think about all those women who go back to work and do just fine, and apparently I am not one of them. I wonder what just fine looks like, why we’re all so fucking focused on appearing fine.
I’m rocking the baby and my former self reappears again, older this time. She makes dinner in her first college apartment. She buys tortellini from Meijer, artichokes in a can, pesto in a jar, and some sundried tomatoes. She thinks this is very fancy. My former self feels kind of sweetness in the air near the end of a long midwestern winter. The snow has gotten gray and ugly and solidified into a horrible icepack, and it’s not pretty, not yet, but now there is the beginning of a thaw. As the gray snow-ice melts, patches of the grass appear beneath. It’s dry and yellow. But it’s there, waiting, and the green is coming.
I’m pushing the baby in the stroller and my former self from three months ago appears. She sits at the kitchen table after the baby is finally down for a nap and cries, can’t stop crying. She thinks she’ll have this feeling forever but even that feeling becomes a former self. She tries to see ahead and cannot, and yet here I am, looking backward and saying yes, yes, your time will be done, your hurt will purple like a bruise into only the memory of hurt. She sits at the kitchen table and cries, and I wish I didn’t have to leave her there.
She thinks she is alone, but here I am sitting in the same spot and looking backward, putting my arms around her.
Maybe the ship is wrecked forever, but the pieces can be put back some other way. Not perfect, not the same, but able to hold water. We exist, we exist, and even if we forget we will still exist, we are here and we are no longer and both are a comfort.
I hold the baby up to the mirror and she lights up with recognition. Next to her, I recognize myself. We both smile at our mirror selves. The baby loves people, is very substantial, does not think twice about her complete selfhood, reaches for what she wants, does not question. The baby waves at everyone, and they see her, cannot help but to see her, and they wave back.
It’s true—what I feared happened. So much of my self has indeed become my child. I forget so many things, but I have learned entire new languages, ways of being. My daughter can’t really speak yet but I know which sounds mean she’s happy, which sounds mean she wants more, which sounds mean dog and which mean bird, even though to most they will sound exactly the same. I know to lay a dark towel on the white kitchen table in the winter because the sun makes it too bright for her eyes. I know which part of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to sing at bedtime, even though Christmas was months ago. I try to be gentle with myself, the way I try to be gentle with my daughter. It works some of the time. I am learning, slowly, to see this not as diminished capacity, but as a new kind of intelligence.
In studies, women who had been pregnant and later had a heart attack had the highest recovery rate from heart failure than any other group. Their hearts were likely mended by their baby’s DNA. Within two weeks or less, many of their hearts often looked brand new.
I always hated the way new moms would talk about themselves, all oh you wouldn’t understand. But you wouldn’t. You couldn’t. And I am trying now to describe it, but it’s a cellular kind of understanding, and how can you possibly describe what your microscopic self is doing? Perhaps my brain is teaching itself how to be again. Some days, I am a monster. Some days, I don’t mind. My daughter teaches me to breathe fire; I’d burn universes for her. The word monster derives from the Latin verb moneo: to remind, to warn, to instruct. My former self no longer feels lost and untethered. She is here, with me. We need each other to stay afloat. Most days, we do.
feature image (shipwreck) photo by Aneta Hartmannová on Unsplash
all other images courtesy of the author
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