Lately I’ve been studying the mysterious workings of the human brain, and the seven styles of intelligence carried within its various lobes. (I’m having trouble sleeping, all right?) The left side of the brain is regarded as the logical side. I’ve noticed a significant degeneration on this particular side since...hmm...when could that be? Childbirth, perhaps? It’s not that I don’t have any sense of logic. Really, I do. It’s just that my pre-parent logic has mutated into something new. I’ve officially classified it as Mommy Logic. (I’m sure that Scientific American will be calling soon.)
Take for instance the dirty dish. Not the dirty dish that you rinse and place in the dishwasher but rather the dirty dish that has been through the dishwasher several times already. Why? Because it still has “tenacious food gunk residue” (a term coined, I believe, by Julia Child) clinging to it. Regular logic says “take it out and scrub it yourself.” Mommy Logic says “a dishwasher, by definition, is supposed to wash my dishes, and I don’t care if it takes three cycles or thirty, that dish is staying there until it is sparkling clean.”
Or how about this one? After ten years of feeding my children, I still put vegetables on their plates. Mommy Logic insists that as long as something vegetabular (another Julia Child term) is included in a meal, it counts towards their daily nutritional requirements. And every time I scrape carrots, broccoli or rainbow chard down the disposal I rest easy in the knowledge that the mere aroma surely carried valuable vitamins and minerals through my children’s nasal passages and directly to the mitochondria of their cells. At the very least the vegetables must have rubbed up against the neon orange macaroni and cheese, thereby transferring important nutrients by osmosis. (Mommy Logic relies heavily upon osmosis.)
Mommy Logic can also be seen in my own wardrobe closet, where my pre-firstborn child, size four jeans hang, just to inspire me. (I think I might be getting the terms inspiration and masochism mixed up.) “Today just might be the day,” I reason, forgetting the fact that even if I could ever possibly fit into those jeans again (a miracle akin to the parting of the Red Sea), it would only be long enough for me to look in a mirror and say to myself,
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