Jelly Brain is My Reality
Posted by Anita Tue, 18 May 2010 05:53:00 GMT
Jelly brain, nappy brain, spaced invaders, I am sure that every mother of small children suffers from this at some point. Those that know me well would probably not be surprised that at the best of times I can be fairly described as a bit vague, but now that I have two small children the I feel that my brain has been wrapped in cotton wool all the time.
Take last week for example; I was at Mainly Music, an excellent institution that has music for the kids and mums to mingle and dance, and one of the other Mums remarked that my daughter loves to dance. Under normal circumstances I would have made some sort of reply along the lines of “yes it is one of her favourite things to do”. But it just happened to happen during an extreme attack of nappy brain. All brain cells bar two seemed to be otherwise engaged. Number one brain cell starts jumping up and down saying “ooh look someone’s talking to us”, number two says “huh?”, I turned to her and raised my eyebrows and smile as if to indicate I hadn’t heard. She repeated her remark. Number one cell still registering that I was being spoken to number two getting busy working on a reply says “Stall, stall!” so I said “Pardon?” The upshot is the poor woman had to have three attempts just to get me to reply to a simple statement!
I wonder what it is that turns us normally intelligent women into people with the brain capacity of the average zombie but without the predilection for brains? I don’t believe that lack of sleep is solely to blame (although it always amazes me what we can get away with). But if you combine that with having your day taken up with routine tasks constantly interrupted by crisis after crisis (children seem to be able sense when you are just getting into a rhythm with your task, you are just starting to relax, enjoy it and suddenly they are scratched by the cat and the world ends). And the person you spend most of your waking hours communicating with either wilfully ignores what you say or doesn’t understand, and you have to figure out which it is without prematurely loosing your cool. God when I look at it like this I can only count my blessings that nappy brain only strikes at discrete moments (no matter how embarrassing) and I’m not wondering around like a post-lobotomy outpatient all the time.
