This is the last installment of #10yearsaparent for 2014. I’ll be back with more wisdom and insight from my vast knowledge of parenting January 9, 2015.
The other day I was getting ready to leave my yoga studio, and I experienced a flare up of parenting amnesia.
I overheard a conversation between two women about infant sleep. The mother of the infant was distraught about everything–her unsleeping child, her husband’s reaction to the situation, her own exhaustion.
Like every first time mother, she was searching for some logical answer – maybe the baby’s having a growth spurt or it’s something she’s eating or as one popular parenting book recommends maybe there’s a hair wrapped around the baby’s toe.
My heart went out to her, because I’ve been there. I wanted to give her some sense of support so I asked her how old her baby was, thinking I would offer some insight.
When she replied, “Five months,” all I could say was, “Yeah, it’s hard.” And then I unhelpfully added, “It doesn’t last forever.”
I simply could not remember what it was like to parent a five month old infant. Full blown amnesia. I can not even imagine what we did all day or how we dealt with sleepless nights. And according to the photographic evidence, I did it twice.
I am one of millions suffering from the widespread, under examined phenomenon known as parenting amnesia.
The theory of parenting amnesia is that your brain blocks out your previous parenting experience as a method of self-preservation.
Because if you actually remembered how it went down, any logical, well-learned person would not sign up for THAT again. So your brain inhibits the memories, and you carry on blissfully ignorant of how miserable you actually were. It’s for the good of the species.
Symptoms of parenting amnesia include the smelling of baby heads repeatedly, the unwarranted flip from not wanting any more children to wanting more NOW, a propensity for keeping all children’s clothes and toys just in case, zero recollection of the timing of milestone moments, and the inability to assemble a sippy cup.
If someone asked me today when my babies got their first teeth, my response would be, Babies have teeth?
The only known remedy for parenting amnesia is to record everything. That is why parents have 1000s of digital photos and videos stored away. Baby books were also popular at one time.
As someone continually faced with parenting amnesia, I have very little memory of what parenting was like prior to six weeks ago.
If you or someone you love, suffers from parenting amnesia the best course of treatment is to make sure you are on the same page about the desired number of people in your family.
And maybe take a break from offering unsolicited advice about caring for small children.
#tenyearsaparent is a weekly blog series about what I’ve learned in my first ten years as a parent. Whether you’re a parent nodding in agreement or shaking your head with disgust or a non-parent using these posts as birth control (the surgeon general wants me to tell you that reading blog posts about parenting is not an effective form of birth control), I’ll be spilling the beans on what parenting is really all about.
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