If I lose my thread and begin to segue wildly in all directions, forgive me: I have “mumnesia”.
This is an official medical condition, unveiled recently by a team of American scientists. It afflicts mothers in the first few months after giving birth, rendering them incapable of sensible thought.
The combination of sleep-deprivation, hormonal fluctuations and the sudden rearranging of priorities means they forget anything that isn’t essential to the survival of their progeny.
The mother who complains that her brain has turned to porridge is not being self-deprecating: she is stating a scientific fact.
Emotions bubbling up
As medical conditions go, mumnesia is not unpleasant. There is a bubbling up of intemperate emotion (“I’m so happy, I keep weeping into my husband’s jacket”, as he edges nervously towards the front door.)
In part, this is the fallout from labour —an experience so intense that it casts a hallucinogenic haze over everything that succeeds it.
I do not mean intense in the approving sense, as used by sado-masochism enthusiasts. I mean that it is barbaric, medieval — far, far worse than what anyone will ever tell you.
What the books describe as “discomfort” is, in fact, like being picked up by a giant pair of hands and wrung out until every vertebra in your spine has snapped.
“Why didn’t you warn me?” I keep asking my childbearing friends, to which they either reply with an “I didn’t want to frighten you” or “you wouldn’t have believed me”.
Not unreasonable, but I can’t help feeling rather hurt, as one does on discovering that one’s confidantes have been keeping a shared secret.
There are whispered confessions of bliss, despair and frank ambivalence.
“Sometimes I love her so much it hurts,” reflected one friend, gazing down at her newborn daughter.
I can feel myself slipping into a parallel universe: one where phrases such as Tumble Tots and Tiny Talk may actually mean something; where a pale-faced stranger pushing a pram is no longer invisible but draped in Boadicea’s finery: a warrior-heroine in her own quiet way.
Such is the psychedelia of motherhood — and this time, I’m told, the trip never ends.
