"Placenta brain"

Anyone who has ever been pregnant or spent time with someone who is pregnant will know what I mean.  It seems as soon as you have a small parasite nestling in your womb it sucks all the life out of your brain.  It was bad with my first pregnancy.  Here's me who can remember our social calendar 6 months in advance, pay all the bills on time and, according to my husband, recite back something said in the heat of an argument 5 years previously, suddenly unable to remember what shopping I was supposed to pick up on the way home.  And your brain never recovers.  I never found myself miraculously able to recite back something my husband had promised a year ago.  But I learned to cope.  Then along came the second pregnancy and it got worse.  Not only did I forget what I was going to the shops for I forgot to go to the shops.  I would walk into a room and wonder why I was there.  I started to wonder if I had some early onset of Alzheimers or even what my Mum calls "Old-timers".  Again I managed to never have the power cut off and I learned to cope.  Now with a third pregnancy it is so much worse again.  I can forget what day of the week it is.  I can certainly forget what I was just doing at any point in time.  I forget appointments, dates and phone calls.  Get a diary you say?!  I have one.  The problem is I have to remember to write things down and THEN I have to remember to look in it occasionally.  I have a diary and a calendar that lives on the kitchen bench at home, supposedly to keep track of kids events, family gatherings, bills etc etc.  I have a personal diary to keep track of what I am doing on any given day.  And at work I have Outlook into which I put anything and a reminder pops up at the appropriate time.  Again I have to remember to actually put things in.  I do owe a lot to the Outlook calendar, I even have reminders in there for the days I need to pick up my son from school.  Without which I know there would have been days when I would have gotten to 3pm and wondered vaguely  what I had forgotten before my phone would ring at 3.15 with my sons teacher on the other end wondering who was supposed to be picking up my child.

Again I have to wonder what the evolutionary advantage of losing your faculties ever offered to pregnant women.  Did primitive hunter gathers find it advantageous to forget where they left their first born child?  May be the trauma of being so thoroughly forgotten by the one person who is supposed to care the most toughened our offspring up and left them better able to cope with the rigors of primitive society.  What ever the reason for it there is one small advantage, in 12 months time when I am busy caring for our new baby and our older children all the pains and complaints of pregnancy will be well forgotten.