I Miss My Brain
By Tiffany Lewis 

A few years back, while working in Washington, D.C., I was engaged in one of my favorite pastimes — eavesdropping on a conversation in the Metro.  The conversation was between a man and a woman.  As we sped past Foggy Bottom station, I gathered that the woman had recently returned to work after having a baby.

“Yes,” I heard her say, “I stayed home for three months, and it was fine, but I was ready to get back to work.  I really needed some intellectual stimulation.”

Well, I huffed to myself.  What a small-minded woman.  A baby can provide an immense amount of intellectual stimulation.  Successful childrearing takes brains and education.

This was during the era when I spent time making lists of Things To Do With My Future Children: We would picnic in wild strawberry fields, quote Robert Frost over cups of herbal tea, meditate to the Peer Gynt Suite.

Of course, then I had kids.  My visions of strawberry fields vanished and were replaced by a solitary daydream of a giant cloud, soft as a pillow, where I could sleep and sleep and sleep.  As much as I wanted to strap on my tap shoes and shuffle off to Buffalo for my son, I was overwhelmed by diapers, laundry, nursing, and dishes.

As I began to get the hang of things, I found I was right, partially, in my reaction to this woman.  Mothering takes creativity, humor, and a great many other skills I mostly lack and am trying to acquire.

But I also found the Metro woman’s comment about intellectual stimulation hauntingly true. There are times I just can’t help thinking I left a large chunk of my brain right back there in the delivery room.  It takes an IQ of zero to change a diaper, or mix a bowl of rice cereal, scoop up blocks for the tenth time or scrape cemented Grape-Nuts off the kitchen floor.

I sometimes wonder if my entire college education was for naught. Media law and ethics don’t seem to help a bit in getting my son to stop his tantrum in the Target checkout line. I need a crash course in Intro to Patience.

I used to walk out of college classes filled with ideas about due process of law or the remarkable parallels between Mormons and Muslims. Now I spend my days pondering how that Lego ended up in Addison’s diaper. Where my husband and I used to talk about the fine ethical dilemmas of newspaper reporting, now we talk about the rising cost of baby wipes — should we go name-brand or generic? Or we don’t talk at all. There are nights we’re so exhausted, we lie head-to-head on the couch and just mumble the theme song from “Bob the Builder.” Do-do-do-do-do-do.

In fact, I’ve forgotten how to carry on conversations at an adult level. I have difficulty constructing sentences longer than four words. Once, when my husband and I were eating alone together, I blessed the food to “fill our tummies.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in her book Gift from the Sea, noted poignantly, “The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of the house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls — woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.”

She points out that, by and large, a woman’s work appears purposeless. I can spend an entire day cleaning the house, making food, and managing the kids. At the end of the day I assess: a house littered with toys and diapers, a sink full of dishes, and two sticky, tired children. In a society that praises titles, benchmark bonuses, and the do-it-all coiffed mom, it’s hard not to feel a little dumbed-down.

Or course, there are those moments of rare delight, the ones I daydreamed about when I made my quixotic lists.  I awoke recently to the sound of blaring trumpets, and crept down the stairs to find my husband and two sons galloping around the room to the overture from Man of La Mancha.  The sight reminded me of parenting’s pure joys.

And the other day, I paused from my computer to make my son a wizard hat and we crawled around the room playing Gandalf and Frodo, vying for the magical ring.  If I could play galloping wizard all day, I would have no complaints.  It’s all the in-between stuff that makes me feel like my brain is turning to day-old oatmeal, scattered across the highchair.

The key, I’m beginning to realize, is finding those things that enrich my life but don’t draw away from my ultimate and most important purpose of mother.  In fact, I’ve tried to find activities that both enrich my life and that of my kids.

Now that my son is 3, we’ve begun reading a chapter each night from a children’s book.  We just finished Charlotte’s Web, and have moved on to Runaway Ralph by Beverly Cleary.  This is my way of parlaying my passion for reading into something I can share with my children.

When I’m not reading to my children, I’m just plain reading.  I’ll read anything, from cereal boxes to magazines to books.  Lately I’ve taken to biographies so I can share stories of inspiring people with my boys.  I’m also in a laid-back book club that manages to read a book about every three months.

I try to write, even just a little.  I write in my journal, I write a weekly family letter about our happenings, and I try, periodically, to write a personal letter to each of my sons that I’m compiling in a book.

We play a lot of music around here.  We listen to our share of Itsy Bitsy Spider, but we also buzz around to Flight of the Bumblebee and march to Pomp and Circumstance.  I pull out my guitar and we sing.  I took violin lessons for one blissful week, and felt my brain come alive as never before.  Alas, it ended as quickly as it began.

I periodically check out foreign language tapes from the library, preferably the children’s kind.  That way we’re all able to learn something.  The day I checked out a set of French tapes, we actually came across a little French girl at the beach.  I was thrilled to use my newfound abilities.

Here are some other brain-enriching ideas from friends:

• Sheralie Broadbent, in Humble, Texas, plays her digital keyboard each night to keep up her musical talents without waking the kids.  She hosts a fantastic monthly online book club.  She’s a member of a co-op music group that gathers once a week to sing folk songs, learn about instruments, and dance to all sorts of music.  She goes to museums and the library, where she checks out DK Eyewitness books.  Instead of reading the newspaper, she reads The Economist each week.  She and her husband are hooked on The Teaching Company, which puts out DVDs and tapes of lectures by world-renowned professors, so she can learn about astronomy while she irons and folds laundry.
• Mary Thorley is re-reading The Lord of the Rings series and reads the newspaper each day (although usually only the opinion page, which she doesn’t find as depressing). She takes advantage of living near Washington, D.C., to see the sights, and when she travels she visits museums and historical landmarks. She also gives speeches, mostly to herself and mostly in the shower, but claims they are quite elegant.
• Melanie Dewey, the venerable mother of 1-year-old twins from Provo, Utah, just began taking voice lessons, and plans to run a marathon. She is also an accomplished pianist.
• Christy Jacobs of Seattle teaches piano and attends a book club. She also finds doing her taxes quite stimulating, except when she has to write the government a check. She says her post-motherhood goals of keeping up on her Mayan and Hebrew have given way to garage-sale shopping and baking. But since I’ve tasted her baking, I can vouch that it is a language unto itself.
• Sharon Finlinson, from Miami Beach, takes piano lessons, something she was never able to do growing up. She also teaches piano and violin in her home and is a member of a community orchestra, when she has the time.  She also enjoys doing extensive research online, whether it’s to purchase a minivan or just to find out what activities are happening in the area.
• Emily Dunford, who lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah, is an avid listener of National Public Radio, which she finds more enriching than Oprah or the Today show. She also listens to books on tape, and enjoys calling real live adults to practice her conversational skills.

As Meridian readers, I would love to hear your ideas on how you enrich your lives as mothers, as well as the lives of your children.  Because, in my mind, that is what mothering is all about — growing up with our kids, not so we can recite all the lines from Dora the Explorer, but so we can enjoy the splash of color on a canvas, the piercing strain of the violin in Meditation, the humor and wit of Shakespeare.

While pushing the stroller to the park last week, I began quoting Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life.”

“ ‘Life is real, life is earnest — ”

“Look!” my son interrupted, pointing to the road. “A dump truck. Wow!”

Alas, I still want to lie in those strawberry fields.  Perhaps in the end, the effort will feel like fighting giant, Fisher-Price windmills.  But I’d rather do that than the dishes any day.