Week 27: Pregnancy brain

Many of my blog posts have centered upon the “extras” you get to enjoy as a pregnant woman. Fun bonuses, such as varicose veins and dropping 50 percent of what you touch. One more of these ever-enjoyable add-ons is the side effect so lovingly referred to as “pregnancy brain.” I did not think, at the beginning of my first pregnancy, that pregnancy brain was a real thing. Until it hit me. Hard.
And now I’m almost two-thirds of the way through pregnancy No. 2 (yikes!) and am once again enjoying a brain that chooses to take a break at the most inopportune moments. Under normal circumstances, I’m just like everyone else. Pregnant or not, sometimes I’ll go into a room and suddenly realize I don’t know why I am there. I forget where I left my phone. You know—the usual kind of silliness.
But pregnancy brain is a whole other animal.
And because of the seriousness of this condition (almost as serious as the need for a new box of Kleenex every time I tune into the final Harry Potter—see week 25 post), I’ve been waiting to blog about it for weeks now. I was originally going to write about it the week before Christmas. I had many instances where pregnancy brain reared its forgetful head that week. But then I realized I obviously needed to blog about the holidays that week. So I tucked the topic away, knowing I’d come back to it.
So the next week came—the week of New Year’s. And I couldn’t remember any of the examples I was going to use in my post. Yes, I appreciate the irony. Actually, I don’t appreciate it; I despise it, but anyway. Because my memory failed me, I wrote about something else. Surely, by the following week, I would be able to come up with a few examples of how my brain had failed me.
Aaaaaaannnnnnnddddd … nope. The next week came and went without a single recollection of my pregnancy brainedness. That, of course, is not to say there were no examples of my brain going out to lunch. There were plenty. I just couldn’t remember them! So, I wrote about the dropsies (a very popular topic with my class, by the way, and always good for a laugh with 8-year-olds). Maybe week 27 would give me better memories.
Except it didn’t. But this week, I decided, it was time to write about pregnancy brain. Even though I can’t remember the examples. What I do remember is feeling the need to constantly remind others that I have pregnancy brain. For example, when my husband asked me to remind him that we needed to do something (no idea what it was—I can’t remember), I told him, “I’ll try, but I have pregnancy brain.” (Which of course caused him to respond with how I blame everything on my pregnancy. Again.) When one of my colleagues asked me to remind her she needed to read a petition during an All-School Mass, I said, “I may not be the best person to ask since I have pregnancy brain.” And when I opened my email to check for important notes and ended up searching for allergy-friendly snacks for the 100^th day of school, I completely forgot the reason for turning on my laptop in the first place: writing this blog post!
If it wasn’t attached to me, I think I’d forget my … wait. What was I saying?