Baby Brain That Lasts Forever?! Why Can’t I Remember Stuff?

I looked out the window to my driveway and my heart sank. My car wasn’t there. It must have been stolen!

“My car is missing!” I said, in a panic, to my four-year-old. She pointed beyond the large tree in our front yard, where she could see the rear of my car poking out from where it was obscured by the leaves. It was parked on the street.

I only ever park it on the street if my husband has parked his car in the driveway…which is quite rare. Because I’m a work-from-home mother and he works elsewhere, I’m usually here all the freaking time. While I did have to go out yesterday, I was home before him, so I would have had first dibs on the driveway. So I called him up and accused him of pranking me by moving my car before he left for work. He swore blind that my car was parked on the street yesterday when he got home from work. He thought it was odd, but he didn’t say anything when he came inside.

Still suspicious that someone was pranking me, I asked my eldest daughter. She has no capacity whatsoever for shenanigans, so she’d let me know if I was being trolled. Unlike the middle kid, who is more likely to be a ringleader, putting her dad up to the prank in the first place. Because trolling mum = hilarious, of course.

“You parked it there when we got back from netball practise last night,” she assured me. “I thought it was a bit weird, but I didn’t say anything.”

Great, it would appear I’m just losing the plot, because I have no memory of parking there, and my family didn’t speak up so I might have known yesterday.

This is just the latest in a line of bizarre short term memory losses I have had lately. A few weeks ago, I asked my middle daughter why she hadn’t informed me her class had been doing gymnastics all term, traveling once a week by bus to a gymnasium to do so, no less.

“You signed the permission note!” she shot back. Oh. I probably did.

I frequently go to tell my husband something I’ve heard on the news or whatnot and he looks at me, miffed. “I told you this yesterday!” he’ll say. “We had an entire conversation about it.”  Oh. We did? I can’t ever remember.

Today my Facebook’s “On This Day” feature reminded me of a memory from four years ago (the irony of this is not lost on me) where, dealing with baby-brain and lack of sleep from middle of the night feedings with a two-month-old baby I posted: “You know you’re seriously sleep-deprived when you somehow manage to lose the kettle.”

According to my explanation in the comments, (because of course I would have forgotten this incident otherwise) I had filled the kettle up, gotten sidetracked and wandered off with it in my hand instead of putting it back on its base and turning it on. I eventually located it on the table near the front door in my hallway, with no idea how it got there.

But can I still blame my short-term memory loss on “baby brain” four years later? In fact, it is almost 11 years since I had my first child, and my forgetfulness seems to get worse every year.

One of my friends joked that baby brain is eternal and never goes away. And I’ve got three kids so “Like Beetlejuice. You summoned it three times and now it won’t go away.“

I hope that’s it.

I can remember with terrifying clarity random things from primary school. Like the middle names of all my friends and who I sat next to in each class. And my friend Jane will tell you (hi Jane!), I have retained way more details about embarrassing things that happened in high school than she is comfortable with. I remember these things like they happened yesterday. Like that time when Jane was 13 and… (just kidding, I’m not going there, I just wanted to raise her blood pressure a little…)

But I don’t remember yesterday like it happened yesterday.

A more likely reason for this forgetfulness is what scientists have found to be a downside to overloading our brains and constantly multitasking. And believe me, multitasking is my entire life.

You know that meme about a woman’s brain being like a browser with 3421 tabs open at the one time? That is totally my brain most of the time as I juggle motherhood, work, my household, life in general, and the sorts of useless random information that’s not good for anything except pub trivia.

Right now, my brain is occupied with: writing this post for SAHM and the other things I need to write today, waiting for a phone call from the school principal to discuss an incident that happened yesterday, why Lily Allen’s version of “Womanizer” is much better than the Britney Spears one, why people keep driving trucks into Melbourne’s Montague Street Bridge, what to have for lunch, telling myself to remember to stack the dishwasher once the dishwasher cleaner thingo that’s currently doing a cycle finishes, thinking I really hated those hats Elton John wore in the early 1980s but I hate the fake hair he wears today even more, I better check in on my grandfather and see how he’s going, pikelets are yum, oh shit I need to charge my phone…if it goes dead, I will miss that call from the principal, I have to pick up a parcel from the post office before it shuts today, missing socks that need to be located, remembering I haven’t booked accommodation yet for a trip I’m taking soon…why do I keep forgetting, uptown funk you up, uptown funk you up, I need to make sure dinner is cooked early tonight so I can get my eldest to Cubs at 6:30, I keep forgetting to check what movies are on this weekend because hello, well-deserved long-overdue date night with my husband, and all that f*cking laundry that isn’t going to fold itself.

And those are just the things that I can remember. Exhausting, right?

In 2011, researchers from Concordia University reported in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology that people who have too much information in their brain experience memory loss. Our brains are amazing storage systems, but when you are unable to declutter your mind, it becomes harder to retrieve information on call. I guess it’s a bit like a computer hard drive that’s overloaded with junk and there’s no memory left for new data.

And while most of us think we’re being super useful by doing several things at once, multitasking can actually be just an illusion of accomplishing more, faster. Neuroimaging studies have found that our brains don’t really focus on several things at the same time. Our brains give attention to one thing for microseconds, and then the other thing, and back and forth.

Switching of attention (like switching between browser tabs) means that when you’re focusing on one thing, you aren’t focusing on the other. This creates memory loss. What were you thinking about a few seconds ago? Can’t remember? That’s why. You can actually miss information and miss storing it in your memory bank.

So it is no surprise this stuff becomes more pronounced when you have kids – entire other people to worry about and focus your attention on, hence, we think of it as “baby brain”.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a kettle to switch on so I can remember in about two hours that I was going to make a cup of tea.