I was asked if I had ‘baby brain’ – it’s insulting

‘Anything to add, Kat?’ my boss asked on the Zoom call.

Every pair of eyes in the tiny chat boxes seemed to lock onto me, followed by a heavy silence broken only by the sound of my own panicked breaths.

I did have something to add. I’d even flagged it at the start of the meeting. 

But as the minutes passed, the thought had simply slipped away. Now all that remained was the faint impression that it had even been there at all.

‘Sorry, it’s gone,’ I admitted. ‘Classic baby brain, I guess?’ I added, my cheeks flushing with embarrassment.

Everyone smiled at me warmly, and we quickly moved on, though I couldn’t help but mentally chastise myself for struggling to remember a vital point.

Looking back now, I realise my focus shouldn’t have been about my forgetfulness, but on how I’d just turned what my body was going through into a punchline.

Motherhood is a seismic shift, touching every part of our lives – particularly, it now transpires, neurologically.

‘Baby brain’ is the term we often use to describe forgetfulness or feeling less capable during pregnancy – and it’s often accompanied by a swift apology. 

But new research suggests that neurological changes during pregnancy amount to far more than a simple dose of benign forgetfulness.

Instead, it’s suggested that it’s more like a ‘rewiring’, designed to prime women for the challenges and responsibilities of motherhood. 

A recent study from the Be Mother project found that grey matter (which is involved in processing information, empathy and emotions) decreases by an average of nearly 5% during pregnancy.

Professor Susana Carmona, who co-led the study alongside Professor Oscar Vilarroya likens the process to ‘pruning a tree. Some of the branches are cut to make it grow more efficiently.’

Researchers discovered that the women whose brains underwent the most significant changes were also those who reported the strongest emotional connection and bond with their newborns.

And yet, too often, these very real neurological changes are dismissed or laughed off – both by expectant mothers trying not to rock the boat, and those around them – as the supposedly innocuous ‘baby brain’.

Not only that, mothers will often beat themselves up, as I did, for being impacted by these biological changes. 

The day of that Zoom call, my pregnancy app had cheerfully announced that my baby was now ‘the size of a lemon,’ noting that neck development was underway. 

My body was quietly developing the delicate curve of my unborn child’s neck – and yet I was berating myself for a fleeting moment of forgetfulness.

This all needs to change.

I heard the phrase ‘baby brain’ all through my pregnancy and long into those hazy postpartum months, from all manner of people – including myself. 

It popped up when I kept accidentally referring to my son River as ‘she’, or when I’d walk into the kitchen to make a bottle and somehow come back with a coffee instead, with no memory of why I’d gone in there in the first place.

Even the well-intentioned receptionist at my GP joked kindly about it, as I realised I’d forgotten my Personal Child Health Record yet again.

But amid a giant scar across my tummy where seven layers had been sliced open, postnatal depression, and a nagging feeling like I was failing at motherhood, those moments didn’t feel funny or harmless.

Instead of ‘baby brain’ being a reassuring explanation for – or, worse, joke about – the fog, it felt like further proof that I wasn’t quite up to scratch anymore. That somewhere along the way, I’d become less capable than I used to be.

And even four years after welcoming my son, I still beat myself up about it.

I catch myself blaming ‘baby brain’ for slip-ups, hoping no one notices he’s practically school age now. I berate myself for not being the person I was before motherhood. 

For falling into the trap of working as if I don’t have children and mothering as if I don’t have a job. 

But this sort of forgetfulness isn’t just a funny or silly moment of unexplained ditsiness; it’s a very real biological upheaval happening in a key area of the brain.

When talking about the study, Prof Carmona noted that this neurological change shouldn’t be viewed as a negative, or considered merely through the lens of a decrease in memory – and she’s right.

The fact we can keep the million mental tabs required of a new mother open when we’ve lost nearly 5% of our grey matter is a heroic feat of physiology.

And yet, in a patriarchal world, we’re still expected to apologise or laugh at ourselves for any upheaval caused by changes to our brain, rather than acknowledge the profound and potentially incredibly positive changes it brings.

It’s time to recognise these neurological changes for what they are – science – rather than laughing them off as a pregnant woman’s ditsiness or forgetfulness.

When it comes to terms like ‘baby brain’, we need to choose our words a little more carefully.

As with so many facets of women’s health, research into the effect of pregnancy on the brain is woefully underresearched – and will continue to be, unless we stop apologising for a biological process over which we have no control.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. 

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