Do you still suffer with ‘Baby Brain’?

So how long can you get away with the ‘baby brain’ excuse?  I used it recently when I had forgotten to take in some forms to school.  “Oh I must have baby brain!” I uttered.  The receptionist and all of my children looked at me.  “Do you have something to tell us, Nikki?” “No, definitely not!” was my very hasty reply.  There are definitely no more babies to be had here.  That shop closed three years ago.  But looking at my ‘baby’, I realised that I really have to think of a new excuse for my seemingly permanent state of stupidity.

So I went home and consulted the great oracle that is Google and low and behold, there are lots of reports and theories about ‘baby brain’.  Apparently, scientists claim that due to certain hormone increases during pregnancy, women do suffer with memory loss and other such symptoms, but this should generally wear off around three months after the baby is born.  Three months?  So not three years then.

So what is my excuse then?  My children will vouch that I really do have the world’s worst memory and as they all have memories like elephants, this can sometimes pose a problem.  Lack of memory is one thing, I know that I could if I so desired do puzzles and things to help stimulate my memory, but it is the day to day things that really bug me.

Let me give you some examples.

Doors.  Seemingly simple devices. You open them and then you close them.  Yet for some unknown reason, I struggle with push/pull doors.  Most of them have a big sign telling you what to do with them, some of them I navigate on a regular basis.  In spite of this, I still manage to make a complete arse of myself struggling to get through them.  It is a really good job that my front door at home isn’t push/pull otherwise we would probably have to move out.

Left and Right.  This problem may well drive my poor husband to buy a Satnav.  When I am giving directions, I really have to think about which is my left and right.  Someone recently taught me to make an L shape with my fingers and thumb and the one that looks like an L is left.  Or my default check is that I write with my right.  That is all well and good, but back in the adult world, if you are dealing with a respectable adult, you do look like a fool by checking your hands before you continue to give directions to someone.  Then there are the obvious problems that come from being chief map reader.  My husband now assumes that he should go the opposite direction to the one given by me, especially if I haven’t had time to think about it.  Most of the time, he is right to do so.

Supermarkets.  I have never been one for lists and on the rare occasion that I do make a list, I leave it at home.  So I go out with the list of things that I need in my head and I tell myself that I need five things.  In the car, I will remind myself of those things and sometimes even mentally put them into alphabetical order to see if that helps.  Does it buggery!  The minute I walk through those air-conditioned doors, the list has gone.  Evaporated.  The children can be quite useful at this point as they revel in the fact that they can remember and I can’t.

I once watched an amazing workshop at school by a group of people who taught the children some very lively and unusual ways of remembering information.  Colourful mind-maps, acronyms and elaborately visual stories all helped the children to remember a random list of things.  Great if you’re revising for an exam, but do they work for my poor weary brain?  Not a chance.

Putting random household objects in very random places.  This is definitely getting worse as I get older.  I constantly find myself trying to put the kettle in the fridge and the children in the tumble dryer.  Toilet rolls end up all over the place.

Keys.  I went through a stage of locking us out of the house several times in a space of a few months.  I keep my car and house key on the same bunch of keys and as soon as I shut the door, I realise that they are still on the table inside.  My poor husband who works an hour a way has had to rescue me a few times.  These days, I have a spare attached to my bag and spares with friends and family just in case.  I am also very good at leaving said set of keys dangling from the lock, inviting any old person to come on in and rob us.  Luckily, someone usually notices and lets us know, but that is definitely not a habit that I would recommend.

My final issue is my children’s names.  My gran came from a large family and had more than her fair share of children and grandchildren and she used to work through a list of names until she got to the right one.  It used to make me laugh, that was until I started doing it.  Again, this seems to happen more frequently as I have got older, but the kids do get really fed up with it.  It seems to happen more when I’m cross for some strange reason, but I have contemplated giving them all name tags just to try and help me to stop doing it.

So if it isn’t baby brain, what is it?  Is it something that happens as you get older?  I lead a busy life, I probably don’t get as much sleep as I should and there are often several things going around my brain at any given moment in the day, so maybe it is simple down to the stress of life as a parent.  Still, I will have to stop calling it ‘baby brain’ now for fear of giving people the very wrong idea.  Maybe toddler brain?  Or Stressy Mummy brain?  What would you call it?