6 Months

Today our baby is six months old. Every cliche about how quickly time flies and how much one can love their child is 100% true. I really enjoy being Lola Dee's mom. I marvel at everything about her and am still surprised by the fact that nothing about her has ceased to be as exciting and wonderful as it was those first few weeks. Granted, she's still in that phase where she demonstrates some new trick every day...still, though. I'm eating it all up and truly cannot fathom a time where she becomes "old hat" so to speak.

That being said, however, I must take a moment to discuss my motherhood-related challenge: the total loss of my brain. I read about and listened to 1st-hand accounts of the scatter-brained-ness pregnancy and motherhood can cause, but didn't pay it much heed.

Oh, I wish I had known.

I'm fairly intelligent. I would admit to being well-read and educated. Yet I am frustrated daily, even hourly, by moments of total brain shut-down, usually at those critical moments I need my brain most. I can't describe the inner turmoil it causes as I hear myself struggling to communicate in cohesive sentences or suddenly realize that I've overlooked or forgotten something important and even obvious. My baby, so far, has been easy. Rarely does she needlessly cry, she sleeps as well as one could hope, and she's healthy and developing as she should. However, my brain functionality - or rather the lack thereof - has been the true challenge of motherhood.

I read this fantastic book on the female brain when Lola was first born, so I understand the biological reasons why my brain is betraying me - at least when it comes to being intelligent - yet I thought by now I would have regained some control. But I haven't. And I'm starting to worry this might be a permanent condition or one that gets worse over time and/or with the addition of more children.

(Insert a huge, depressed, hopeless sigh here.)

In a meeting this morning with a senior executive I was asked for my thoughts on something...I can only describe the sentence that came out of my mouth as verbal throw-up. And, like actual vomit, I was powerless to stop it. It just kept coming. Unlike real vomit, however, I felt metaphorically sick-er afterward. There was no momentary relief from the malady; no, rather it was the cause of the yuck I'm still feeling.

Anyway. Writing is good medicine. It provides a way to extract the mess floating around in my head onto something else where I can then, objectively, evaluate it or forget about it all together. So there you have it. Hopefully I can move on and actually accomplish something today.

To end on a lighter note and again returning to the awesome part of motherhood I'll leave off with this:
Lola's first swing. She was concerned at first (it seems to be her default condition...those eyebrows!), but she soon warmed up to it. Dare I say she loved it?

I just love her.

Post edit: Lola's six months as of TOMORROW. My dates are all mixed up. Yet another Mom-Brain moment.