Missing – Your Brain

Here’s the dirty little secret they don’t tell you in the glossy parenting magazines.

You miss your brain.

You miss conversations where you had something to offer other than this floaty, under-water feeling, this blank mush that used to be your frontal cortex that can no longer be counted on to fire.

You watch and listen to adult activity going on around you and think, “Do something now,” but your brain is on strike. “Ya talkin’ to me?’ it says, at which point, you’ve missed your opening and the conversation moves on. You smile gamely; you keep expecting some version of your former intelligence to be available. Time after time, it surprises you that all you have left is this blank, vacuous, space in your head.

Conversations aren’t the only challenge. There’s also the brain-dead activities: like when you go to the grocery store and come back with everything but the crucial ingredient for the recipe that you’re trying to prepare. Or you go to the computer to order a prescription on-line and instead answer a bunch of meaningless e-mails but log off without the re-fill. Even after you have bypassed all those political “must-read” messages.

Someday, you tell yourself, you will be politically informed again. In the meantime, you’re very active in another sort of politics; in fact, you’re sort of an ambassador of peace. You patrol the borders of the daily sibling skirmishes and the uncertain dynamics of playground inclusions and exclusions; you negotiate play dates that teeter from gleeful to hostile, moment to moment.

You hope these are good enough excuses as to why your brain is so fried. But you even got sleep last night and today, have childcare. You should be making a list, getting organized, knocking things out. Instead, you’re sitting glazed over, watching the world pass.

Last night, when you sat with Little Sister clinging and drooling all over Big Brother’s book, attempting to defuse his annoyance before it escalated to outrage, “Why does she always ruin my stuff?” because the last thing you wanted were tears before bedtime, that wasn’t at all what you’d pictured when you’d snuggled down with both kids who were miraculously bathed and powdered before eight-thirty. This was supposed to be the sweet time of the day, during what were supposed to be the good years. At least that’s what all the older parents keep telling you as they watch your kids twining themselves around you when you just want to extract your wallet in the grocery line. The older parents stand there, wistfully telling you how much you’re going to miss these tender years.