Mother-brain and mother-eyes

I now have a mother-brain. No matter what I am doing, there are all sorts of Zoë thoughts floating around in my head or at the very least, one. This makes it difficult to A) be totally carefree when eating at a restaurant without her, B) teach church lessons, and C) have completely coherent conversations.

Since I go back to work in three weeks (though thankfully at home), I've been a little worried about C. Notice how placing it third not only eased the transition into this paragraph but also augmented the phrase's alliteration? That's me seeing if I, holder of an English MA, can still write a sentence with "alliteration" in it. It didn't go too well because right now I'm wondering if Zoë is actually asleep in the next room and whether she's the right temperature in just a diaper and light blanket. Would a onsie and no blanket have been better? But then her feet get cold.

I was talking to my cousin the other day and she said something like this: it's not that mother-brains are dumb, as I've heard so many mothers profess. It is that they are unfocused. I would have to agree. A more positive way of describing it would be a split consciousness, though that sounds a little Freudian. There I go again. I shouldn't try to bring up Freud while wondering whether Zoë will want to eat in the next half an hour or if I should go to bed now.

On the other hand, motherhood--while robbing me of my former capacity to super-focus on intellectual tasks (don't tell my boss)--has offered me new eyes. I feel as if a whole secret world that heretofore (no comment) did not exist has suddenly been revealed to me. I see mothers everywhere with children who are smaller or bigger permutations of Zoë doing things that Zoë has done or will do and these mothers and their children and their motions and their concerns are all of the sudden intimately familiar to me. It is like finding myself fluent in a language that I heard for the first time only a few weeks ago.

In short, I am transformed.