Bird brained

. . . he constrained her to gaze into his eyes, and he laid a spell of utter darkness and forgetfulness upon her . . . .

Pam, with twice as many babies as I'm dealing with and two postpartum weeks behind me, has her mom mojo back already. Melrose is making jokes about her not un-near death experience. I, ever the maternal underachiever, have spent the last four weeks barely keeping my nostrils above the quivering meniscus of postpartum woe.

Babies, man. They get me down. Down, though, is really a side effect. The real trouble is that babies make me crazy. Some combination of hormonal catastrophe, life upheaval, sleep deprivation, and pain make my brain just plain not work. I cannot make choices of any kind, such as what I want off a Chinese carryout menu or what to do with my 7-yr-old's hair every morning. I cannot answer questions, as the poor man who stopped by here looking for a misplaced pair of gloves can attest (really, glove guy, I haven't always been an idiot). And the rest, as you may unfortunately know, is considerably uglier.

I remember hearing once that the reason birds are "bird-brained" is that so much of a bird's brain is devoted to flight. I don't know if that's the real deal vis-à-vis birds, but the principle surely applies to me. I am always baby-brained. The newer the baby, the less brain I have to put toward anything else, to the point of extremely impaired functioning in any other capacity. And the addle-brained, weepy new mom is another one of those things that isn't cute and jokey even though people talk like it is. A compromised brain in a compromised body becomes very bad not just at deciding between Lo Mein and General Tsao, but also at discerning reality from fear and lies when time oozes by shapeless and lonely and dark, and the road ahead appears extraordinarily, mercilessly long and treacherous. Forsake me not utterly.

The baby is not starving. The children are happy. The sun will shine again. No one shall pluck us out of His hand. And if I get my brain back, so much the better.