Ever since I became pregnant with Carson I have realized that I am a little...uh...slower...mentally. During pregnancy everyone referred to it as "pregnancy brain", after pregnancy "exhaustion", 18 months later I was pregnant again, then exhausted, but now, almost TWO YEARS since having my last baby, I find myself still...slower...metally.
I constantly lose words. Which is tough and sometimes embarrassing for a college professor. I mean words I JUST said, I go to repeat them and POOF they are gone from my brain. I lose track of my thoughts during a story. I forget things like CRAZY before leaving the house in the morning. Names are just a lost cause. Getting everything off my grocery list is a thing of the past. Feeling mentally stable in general, is well done for.
Since I can not longer blame it on "pregnancy brain" or even "exhaustion" thanks to my wonderful sleepers, I started thinking elsewhere. And I have come up with "Multi-tasking Overload" as my official diagnosis. What the *$%# is that? Well, here's my explanation and there are two main parts...
The minute a mom becomes pregnant she no longer EVER loses her child from her thoughts. EVER. We become very egocentric and feel everything is about us, and that everyone know we are pregnant, even if we don't look it a bit. We NEVER EVER EVER stop thinking about that baby. Ever. Then when the baby is actually born, it goes into over drive. Now not only do we think about the baby, we worry about their safety, replay their morning behavior in our mind all day, wonder what they are doing if we are away from them, think about what we are going to do after school, we plan birthdays 6 months in advance, fret about scrapbooks, or new clothes, or extra curricular activities. We worry about our sick kids if we have to leave them behind, we wonder if our kids are having fun at school. We think about our love for them. They NEVER. EVER. LEAVE. OUR. MINDS. even if we ARE focusing on something that is OURS. Our job, our friends, our spouse, shopping. We always have them in the corner of our mind.
Then on top of that, since having Carson, Facebook and Iphones have taken over our lives. We now know more about our friends lives than we EVER have. Hear more news than EVER, work can always track us down, we have access to our emails on our phones, our phones are most always in our hands, it has become normal to have a conversation with a girlfriend while emailing, texting, checking facebook. Two girls, carrying on a conversation with our faces in our phones due to one of the many things the phone allows us to do. And we of course also parent while looking over an Iphone or Ipad... We feel productive. We feel efficient. We feel like we can do it all. We multi-task like MAD!
But how is that interfering with our ability to just focus? Between kids on my brain at all times, wondering if anyone commented on my super cute pic of my kids, or replied to my text about babysitting for me tonight, or to the email I sent to co-workers, trying to remember to blog about the funny thing the kids did that morning or to upload pics for family to see, my brain NEVER focuses on just one thing. Cognitive overload the books would call it, but that applies to so much more. I feel MY problem is just due to doing SO DARN MANY THINGS AT ONCE thanks to technology and having children.
Am I saying that I don't WANT my Facebook or email on my phone? HECK NO!!! This is the world we live in. I teach online, I work at home, I need to be reached. I am just simply wondering when my brain is going catch up to me. Or if there is a way to learn to focus again, or if that was lost when I became a mom... I mean even while typing this, I am talking with C, disciplining L and checking emails from work. Seriously- multi-tasking overload.
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