Your brain on motherhood

Could this help to explain the heightened anxiety many new mothers feel? The forgetfulness of some things and the hypervigilance when it comes to others? The unmooring from our sense of identity?

“…a mother’s brain requires cognitive, emotional, and behavioural flexibility. This helps us adapt to new environments […] flexibility and thinking outside of the box—isn’t that what creativity is?”

“Diaper changes might cut into the time spent on creative work, but they don’t cut out the drive to do it”

“My own creativity these days may come out in a thought tapped and auto corrected on my phone at 2 a.m., or it could come out in a method of bathing three small kids without anyone drowning.”

 “I feel like I can’t get my ideas out fast enough. Sometimes it causes me pain to leave. At the same time, I love going home to my family, switching gears and going into mom mode – it helps normalize me.”

“…I was learning how to see the world, including galleries, in a new way because I was experiencing it with my daughter and I felt like I was re-training my attention in all of these different ways.”

“On a creative level, I feel like becoming a mother has totally deepened and expanded my writing practice. It’s opened me up to thinking about caregiving as a subject with a new kind of focus, and not just caregiving within the boundaries of a parent/child relationship.”

“Making art is also just doing the work, so that’s also boring sometimes. It’s more mentally exciting maybe than changing diapers or something like that, but I see the similarities in that sense.” 

“Much of the creative work that mothers complete may be called acts of everyday creativity, or “little c” creativity. These acts may not be recognized with a Pulitzer, Oscar, or Fields Medal, but as developmental psychologist David Feldman says, these “little c” creative acts are equally as important as “Big C” creativity for the “preservation, enrichment, and continuity of culture.”