Dementia or Baby Brain? You Make the Call!
February 2007 In and Around Town - Delta

People talk about “baby brain”, when pregnant women get absent-minded due to all the extra hormones running amok. The reality is that baby brain lasts the rest of your life, and can affect you whether you're a mom or a dad.

This is just nature's way of preparing you for parenthood with the GIGO principle – Garbage In, Garbage Out. Example: By virtue of being a parent, I can't name even one member of the U.S. Supreme Court, but I can tell you exactly where my four-year-old left her hairband that matches her maroon dress -- it's in between the couch cushions in the family room, along with about 300 pens, my husband's driver's license, Jimmy Hoffa, a school of Goldfish crackers, and about $4.29 in change. When Sara is a teenager, she will roll her eyes at how stupid I am; because all teenagers think their parents are as dumb as toast. I will remind her that I was once an intelligent, cultured human being who prided herself on keeping up on current events. But somewhere around early 2005, my bandwidth was exhausted for such important purposes as differentiating among the trains Thomas, Gordon and Percy, and determining how long a juice box has been sitting out.

And as I said, it's not just moms that are subjected to the parental GIGO principal. As a guy, you might have once known all the stats for your favorite sports team, going all the way back to 1952. But now that you're a father, you need to know the names of all the players on your kids' sports teams. You CANNOT get away with greeting your children's friends with, “Hi Fat Kid Whose Dad Drives a Porsche Boxster!” Old information needs to be replaced with new in order to protect yourself from Boxster Dad, who is also a black belt.

On top of being the parent of a young child, my mind is turning to mush because I'm just getting older, and time seems to be slipping away at a faster rate than ever. As we age, segments of time seem to get shorter. When you're a child, a week seems like a lifetime; when you're older, it seems like 10 years can go by in a blink of an eye. My theory is that they actually DO get shorter. Think about it: When my four-year-old glumly stares out the window at another rainy winter day, and whines, “When is summer going to get here?”, and I tell her, “In about 6 months”, that's 1/8 th of her whole lifetime.

Now, I'm thinking to myself, “Wasn't it just last summer?” That's because 6 months to a 42-year-old is 1/84 th of my lifetime.

Or whatever. I don't remember how to do the math anymore, but I do know the names of all the Backyardigans.