Please don't talk about my "mommy brain"

It's time to retire this phrase entirely.

Inspired by Carine Carmy (see below), I put “mommy brain” into Substack’s image generator, and this is what it gave me.

We couldn’t agree, this colleague and I.

I was an editor at the Portland Press Herald, just a few weeks back from maternity leave, and she and I had returned to a long-running conflict. I thought we had made a plan that would help us stay on track to meet a deadline. She had a different plan.

Is it possible, she asked me, that I misremembered our prior conversation? After all, she said, breastfeeding can “muddle your mind.”

I seethed. The conversation ended. My eyes burned and my face grew hot.

I was balancing so much—a brand new baby who was nowhere near sleeping through the night; the same workload as ever in a demanding job in a newsroom where I would be the only new birthing parent in the three years I worked there; plus three trips a day to a closet to pump, parts to clean, a daycare routine to adjust to, including daily reports about my tiny baby who cried and cried and wouldn’t nap. I had never felt stretched so thin, until the very fabric of my being vibrated from the tension.

Those few words cut clean through, with the heat of anger: How dare she. And of shame: What if she’s right?

That was eight years ago now. Katherine Matthews, editor of the beautiful new journal Milk, asked me recently, given what I learned about the parental brain while reporting my book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, do I still use the phrase “mom brain” to describe those otherwise seemingly inexplicable moments of forgetfulness?

I don’t, I told her. Even before I spent years studying this science, “mom brain” has always made me feel squeamish.

The phrase and its iterations are unavoidable to me now. Interviewers want to ask about what’s behind their own “mommy brain” moments or, if I lose my train of thought during recording, they may joke, “it’s that mom brain.”

I get it. It makes for easy shorthand to describe the bewildering psychological experience of new parenthood, or to offer some defense, as if those forgetful moments aren’t about us—we are clear-minded and competent—but rather about something happening to us. Something that will pass.

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But even when it’s meant to reassure that this forgetfulness is a shared experience, it is cold comfort. This idea is not benign.

The notion of “mom brain” enables the kind of thinking I faced in the moment above—that the very biology of motherhood is the reason she is being difficult/not up to the task/not worth the promotion/not a capable leader/not to be believed. And it distracts from the real cognitive challenge that mothers and many other new parents are actually grappling with: complete overwhelm in a society that has failed over and over to provide any meaningful support to young families.

Julie Bogen, now audience engagement editor at The 19th, wrote about this in The Atlantic last year. (I would embed her Twitter thread about the story here, but Elon Musk doesn't want to play):

Jessica Calarco, a sociology professor at Indiana University, told me she believes that what we think of as mom brain “is a product of the unequal burden that we have placed on women to do both the physical caregiving for children and also the logistical and mental work of caring for a whole household.” This is a particularly taxing psychological burden, by nature amorphous, impossible to schedule, and happening in the back of your mind 24/7. It’s things like noticing which groceries are running low and knowing what food the kids will eat, or being the one who plans family vacations—and makes sure everyone wakes up on time to make the flight. “The cognitive labor of running a household is as intense as running a Fortune 500 company,” [Eve] Rodsky, [author of Fair Play], said. And her research supports this: Qualitative data from interviews conducted by Rodsky’s team from 2016 to 2018 revealed that, among 200 mothers who were managing more than two-thirds of the “conception and planning” of their household tasks while also working for pay, every single one had a physical manifestation of stress, such as a flare-up of an autoimmune disorder or insomnia.

Overwhelm can affect people’s psychological and physical condition. Chronic stress can trigger major psychiatric disorders, exacerbate cardiovascular strain, and have consequences related to poor birth outcomes. “There is absolutely reason to be concerned about the health of women exposed to chronic stress,” Christin Drake, a psychiatrist at NYU Langone, told me. Although “there are some important differences between women living in extremely stressful conditions like poverty and lack of safety and those experiencing stresses related to big jobs and limited child care, there is likely some overlap in the processes impacting these groups.” And for those who are overwhelmed by household responsibilities, while also experiencing other intense stressors like poverty, the effects could be even worse. When our culture dismisses “mom brain” as a punch line, it is abdicating responsibility for the overwork women are experiencing and its effects on their health.

It’s an abdication and also a falsehood.

Some studies have found small average memory deficits during pregnancy, but these seem to be temporary and the results are actually quite mixed. While postpartum mothers often report feeling forgetful, studies of their working memory offer only very thin, even “nonsignificant” evidence that they actually are, Clare McCormack, Bridget Callaghan and Jodi Pawluski wrote in a recent perspective piece in the journal JAMA Neurology. All three study mental health and motherhood, in different ways. Pawluski’s research on the maternal brain and the time she spent helping me to grapple with her work and others’ were foundational to my writing of Mother Brain.

That disconnect—between what mothers say they experience and what the evidence shows—may be partly a problem of bias, the authors write. Cultural norms impose “strong expectations of mommy brain, where many small and commonplace behaviors (eg, forgetting a word, misplacing the keys) become highlighted as something more,” they wrote. And that bias is carried by many researchers, too, who for too long looked for those deficits while almost wholly ignoring the gains of new parenthood.

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A post shared by Dr. Jodi Pawluski, PhD, PMH-C | Mommy Brain | Mental Health (@dr.jodi_pawluski)

But, in fact, the transition to parenthood is a distinct developmental stage of life that is fundamentally adaptive. For decades in other animals and in recent years in humans, research has found that the brains of birthing and non-birthing parents experience significant functional and structural changes into the early postpartum period, and those changes are thought to last.

The authors argue that it’s “time we rebrand mommy brain as a narrative reflecting the adaptation” of the brain to parenting. And I agree with them entirely—on all but this last bit.

We absolutely need a new narrative. But I don’t want to redefine the phrase “mommy brain.” I want to retire it.

Our understanding of the parental brain—as one that is incredibly flexible and responsive, that is neither distinctly female nor born only from pregnancy, that allows parents to develop practical skills for caring for a baby, and sets them up for a life of learning and relearning how to care for their ever-changing kids—has outgrown this turn of phrase.

We don’t need the shorthand.

We can acknowledge our own cognitive hiccups during pregnancy and the postpartum period as we might at any other point in life, as rooted in the particular circumstances of our lives—too little sleep, a missed meal, an unyielding mental load, or perhaps the attention we’ve poured into other things (our child’s first steps, a concerning ultrasound, the innumerable causes calling us to political action, a project at work).

We can continue to push for research into cognitive function across the lifespan, including in the long-neglected yet widely experienced developmental stage of new parenthood. We’ve only scratched the surface.

Why use a phrase that makes us or our needs feel small? We don’t need it to describe ourselves. We don’t have to accept it when other people use it, either.

What do you think: Keep it or ditch it? Do you have a “mom brain” moment—when you’ve needed the phrase or felt burned by it—that sticks with you. Let me know what you think. Comments below are open to all subscribers.

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It’s a dream event: For me, and hopefully for you, too. I’ll be on stage with heroes Kate Baer, Angela Garbes, Sara Petersen for Cognoscenti’s event “Redefining Motherhood for the 21st Century,” at WBUR’s CitySpace theater in Boston. The event is May 10 at 6:30 p.m. Tiziana Dearing of Radio Boston will host. Tickets are $5-25. Details here.

“Has there ever been a description in literature of what it entails to change an infant’s diaper?”: I haven’t read Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery yet, but this review in The Atlantic prompted me to add it to my TBR list. Reviewer Daphne Merkin writes:

Molnar has written a daring and much-needed novel that has some of the hothouse, unflinching quality of Sylvia Plath’s late poetry. It highlights the fact that, much as we would like to believe otherwise, the maternal instinct is not hardwired, and the unpredictability of the first encounters between mothers and newborns, despite all we are told they should be, bears further study rather than reductive and patronizing theories that don’t always correlate with reality.

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‘A must-read book’: Olivia Dreizen Howell recommended Mother Brain in the newsletter #5Smart Reads. “Mother Brain is going to completely shift the narrative about parenthood and what we understand happens to us when we become parents,” she wrote (more below). Dreizen Howell is shifting narratives herself, along with her sister, Jenny Dreizen. The two created Fresh Start Registries, a place for getting support—material and otherwise—in starting new, including after a divorce.

issue #175 - the one sharing more hacks

What does “matrescence” look like, exactly?: Throughout her maternity leave Carine Carmy took notes on what her own matrescence felt like. The term was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s and repopularized by Dr. Alexandra Sacks, Aurélie Athan and others, to describe the transition to motherhood—akin in the degree of both psychological change and, as it turns out, neurobiological change, to adolescence.

Carmy distilled her notes into a few phrases and dropped them into AI image generator Midjourney. The results are compelling—and, no surprise, not likely to appear on a Hallmark card any time soon:

Mat leave memos