My shrinking brain

Field notes from maternity leave

In the weeks after my daughter was born, I developed an annoying habit of writing to-do lists and forgetting that I’d written them. Or where I’d written them. I’d start new ones and forget those, too — sometimes in the middle of writing them. Even now, when I try to type a sentence, I trail off thinking about whether the room the baby is napping in is too warm. She can’t fully regulate her own temperature yet. She vibrates with delight every time I talk to her in a high-pitched voice. Her head smells sweet, mineral, yeasty — like wet stone and fresh bread.

Two weeks postpartum <3

Longitudinal MRI studies show that women’s brains literally shrink during pregnancy. Gray matter volume decreases across large areas of the cortex, particularly in regions involved in social cognition and emotional processing. The brain isn’t damaged, it’s just working differently, reorganizing itself to learn how to keep a baby alive. On the whole, this is how motherhood has felt to me: not as an addition to who I was, but as a reorganization so thorough I can hardly remember what came before it. Maybe that’s why I’ve found going from one child to two a gentler — and in some ways, more enjoyable process — than going from none to one. It’s difficult to say how much of that is is owed to my confidence as a second-time mom, or the nascent personalities of my children, but regardless, the change didn’t feel as seismic. The architecture had already been reconfigured.

Logistically, I feel like I know what I’m doing most of the time. I know how to help a newborn latch, how to set up a breast pump in pitch darkness, how to install a car seat, how to serve a scrambled egg to a six-month-old. At least in this stage, I am lacking in free hands more often than I am lacking in practical knowledge. There is a rhythm to being the parent of a baby, and it’s easier to find it the second time. Sleep, eat, tummy time. Get outside at least once a day. Get in the bath. Go to bed. Aspects I might have found boring the first time around, I now find peaceful — a reprieve from the arrhythmic vicissitudes of parenting a two-year-old.

Everything is also easier when no one needs a coat

My son went through a phase of intense separation anxiety shortly after his sister was born. I couldn’t walk into a different room without sending him into a panic. He would launch his body against the closed door of the nursery whenever I was trying to quietly feed the baby to sleep. After baths, he’d ask me to wrap him up in a towel and hold him swaddled like a newborn. Anytime the edges of the towel began to slip off his shoulders, he would shriek with fury. He monologues from the moment he wakes up in the morning until the moment he falls asleep. He says things that knock the air out of my chest, things like, “thank you mama for holding me” and “I love you forever” and “I want to cuddle and relax and read books.” The other day he licked one of the dog’s toy rubber balls and said, “Refreshing!” He knows the name of every construction vehicle, which means I do too. He is constantly asking for stories about them. “Want a story about a forklift baking cookies, mama! Want a story about a garbage truck going to the beach, mama!” As soon as I finish one story, he asks for another; new and increasingly specific forms of creative paralysis have ensued. Recently he’s been requesting egg yolks and egg whites cooked separately for breakfast. I acquiesce, of course, because I’m obsessed with him. He usually eats the egg yolks first and then moves on to the whites. When I sing to him before bed, he rests his head in the space between my neck and shoulder, his breath fluttering against my skin. It is the only moment all day that he is still.

Breastfeeding next to a construction site

When I was four weeks postpartum, the nerves in my teeth started dying. Dental X-rays showed multiple infected cracks from grinding my teeth at night during pregnancy. Basically, it felt like someone had taken two knives, boiled them until searing hot, stabbed them into the two opposing corners of my mouth, and left them there for days. I was in so much pain that sometimes all I could do was press a pillow against my cheek and weep. My toddler cried too, when I told him I was in too much pain to read him Horton Hatches an Egg. It hurt to open my mouth. It hurt to do anything other than focus on how much it hurt. I tried alternating Motrin and Tylenol, packing a Q-tip dipped in clove oil under my lips, crushing raw garlic and mashing it against my gums until they burned. I tried everything except the opioid my dentist prescribed for me, because I didn’t want to have to stop breastfeeding. My milk let down twice during the first of three root canal procedures. It soaked through the paper bib that they clipped around my neck. I nursed right away when I got home, lightheaded with relief, the baby’s hands hovering in midair. Now that she’s older, she prefers to keep them clasped beneath her chin. She always looks like she’s praying, or on the verge of bursting into song.

Last week I took some winter coats out of storage and put one on that I hadn’t worn since I was pregnant last winter. When I slid my hands into the pockets, my fingers closed around a single green apple Jolly Rancher — a relic from one of the small survival rituals I devised to endure the extreme nausea and vomiting that plagued my first 20 weeks of pregnancy. The candy had dulled to a matte sheen, sticky through its wrapper. My memory of what it felt like to be so ill that I had to consume dozens of sour candies a day is already hazy. I’ve already started fantasizing about when I might do it all over again.

Signature pose

The more important I become to my children, the less adept I feel at other things besides mothering. The more relevant I am to them, the more acutely I perceive my irrelevance elsewhere. It’s an exchange that feels, somehow, correct — even if it also stings at times. I have anticipatory nostalgia for this season of being so essential, my purpose whittled to a razor-sharp point. Early motherhood leaves no space for mistaking it.

I’ve spent the last three years pregnant, breastfeeding, or trying to conceive. I want more children, and I want close age gaps, and I want to write a book, and go to more parties, and keep publishing this newsletter. I still feel creative impulses, but they don’t always translate neatly to tangible output anymore. In fact, I would say they rarely do. My professional imposter syndrome is never louder than right after I’ve finished building someone else’s bones from scratch. Jealousy prickles whenever I spend too much time online, watching people do things and make things that I wish I’d done or made. There are also a thousand moments every day when I am gut-punched with contentment, when it couldn’t be more obvious that I’ve already done and made two of the most extraordinary things I ever will.

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I’m not in the habit of sharing a lot of personal writing anymore, but publishing this essay felt like a fitting way to commemorate my return from maternity leave. As of today, Gumshoe will be back in your inbox on a regular basis again. I missed you guys!! Thank you so much for sticking with me. xo Harling