Baby Brain

Nada Alic, author of celebrated short story collection Bad Thoughts, navigates reclaiming her mind and body after first-time motherhood.

By Nada Alic

Before I exploded my life with a baby, I spent a lot of time in my head, daydreaming and contemplating the nature of my own mind. I read Jung and Lacan, took personality tests, and saw a hypnotist for several months to gain access into my subconscious. During the pandemic, I even bought an at-home EEG headband to record my brainwaves.

As a writer, I considered it all “research.” I preferred exploring my inner world over being in my body, that fragile animal: vulnerable to the elements, disease, and certain death. Then there’s the general tedium of the physical world which includes things like putting a duvet cover on by yourself, and getting a job. Hard pass! My body is something that happened to me. My mind is spacious and pliable—a realm of possibility.

Anaïs Nin describes the inner world as the genesis of art and necessary for spiritual survival: “I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me… the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself… That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.”

In recent years, the “life of the mind” has been pathologized and maligned as the source of all suffering, while the body is revered as a sacred temple, quietly keeping the score. A more charitable read might be that the desire to retreat inside the mind is a yearning to return to the womb. To come into this world, we all must embark on the odyssey from spirit to flesh; some of us just get stuck in the metaphorical birth canal. Sure, there are modalities like dance, somatic therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and other embodied practices that can help people reconnect with their corporeal form. Then there are people (me) who do none of these things and spend all their waking hours staring at a screen. So what! I want to forget I have a body and feel big like the sky. I want to be an observer; to watch drama unfold elsewhere; for life to happen to other people and for my own waters to be left pristine and undisturbed.

When I found out I was pregnant last January, I cried. I think this is an appropriate response to learning that mysterious forces are churning inside of you to create a human, using your own flesh and blood as raw material. At the same time, there was an exhilaration, a creative drive that could only be realized through the body. I felt something pull me towards the mystery; it’s the same force that calls you to the edge of the cliff and asks, What if?I got pregnant on the first try like the way they do in movies. Instead of imposing my will on life, life had imposed itself on me. I had to surrender to it.

When I asked friends with children what it was like, what I really wanted to know was, What is your mind like now? Are you still in there? Is your creativity still intact? I’d heard about the brain-damaging labyrinth of hormones and sleep deprivation. Even if I made it across that abyss, my attention would be permanently redirected towards my baby, with little time to indulge my inner world.

No amount of books or YouTube videos can prepare you for the moment a human emerges from your body. If you’re lucky—if it all goes smoothly—you’re handed this tiny alive thing that is both you and not you. After hours of being the star of the show, I was instantly and happily relegated to supporting cast; also director, crew, catering, and audience.

Massimo Recalcati in The Mother’s Hands describes this as a necessary reconfiguration: “Motherhood imposes a decentering of one’s own being, without which she cannot host the child.” In the recovery room, I felt porous, boundaryless—not yet a new thing, but some in-between state of becoming. My body: no longer an extraneous appendage or container for my head, but a verb. I was surprised by how unafraid I was, how natural it felt. It was like a homecoming; a belonging to something cosmic. The only experiences that have come close have been when I’ve done acid or watched live music; there’s a sense of, I’ve been here before. I know this place.

So much has already been written about motherhood. The lived experience of it is like the retelling of a dream. Language fails to capture it and the details are boring to pretty much everyone but you. I’m told that amnesia will erase or at least soften my memory of how brutal it is now. I want to capture the feeling, if only to reach out to my past self and ask, Am I still in there? Have I lost myself? Or am I expanding the borders of what a self can be?

The problem with that question rests on the false premise that the self is a fixed thing that is contained between the ears—as if it’s not always being colonized by algorithms, other people, and drugs.

The seductive lore around the creative process tells us that it’s a fickle and mysterious force that must be protected at all costs. The literature, mostly written by men, likens it to catching a big fish, courting a muse, engaging in combat, or becoming monk-like. To be an artist means putting the work above all else. I wonder how much invisible labor thrums in the background of these men’s lives.

And so, I thrum. I’m in a freefall of endless tasks, contorting myself into two-to-three-hour cycles of feeding and naps. Sometimes my writing is enriched by interruption—the way going for a walk or a drive can help you refine ideas. Sometimes it suffers from a lack of continuity and endless false starts.
These days, I find myself less interested in dissociative, vibes-based writing, gravitating towards writing that confronts life itself.

Paradox has become more of a lived experience than a philosophical concept to me: I can be both selfish and selfless; I can feel miserable and burst with love. Being a mother hasn’t made me a better human—it’s just made me a more human human. As novelist Fay Weldon says, “The most wonderful thing about not having children must be that you can go on thinking of yourself as a nice person.”

I’m still learning how to jump from my novel to my baby without feeling the whiplash of a thousand cortisol jolts. I try to remind myself that the brain was not designed to tend to such opposing tasks. Jessi Klein writes about this psychological splitting in her book I’ll Show Myself Out: “How had I bifurcated into two seemingly separate beings? One who was nurturing my son, reading, connecting, present, an earth mother, dare I say goddess? And the other being you might call the ‘real me’ stewing and chewing on my own problems, mentally unmoored from the moment.”

The tension between my inner and outer worlds turns out to be a feature and not a bug of the human condition. “We can’t push away our humanity, as freedom comes through form, not in spite of it,” says Ram Dass in his aptly titled 1986 lecture “Nowhere to Stand.” Confronting the grime of life and the intrusion of other people’s needs is “grist for the mill.” Knowing this doesn’t mean I’m not still grieving the loss of a version of myself. All loss reveals an opening, a reimagining of what can be.

“A lioness, it is implied, will instinctively protect her cubs because she has no internal life of her own… having nothing of her own to grapple with—being ‘it all’ for her child, at the cost of her own inner life—is the very definition, or at least the unspoken agenda, of being a mother,” says Jacqueline Rose in Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. The love I feel for my own child has annihilated any previous notions of what I thought love was. My love for him is cellular. Some days I want to lobotomize the part of my brain that thinks of anything other than him. I’d give it all up and spend my days watching his eyelashes grow. Then, I’ll wake from the dream of milk and baths and rocking and remember myself. I’ll remember that I need to write. I also need to make money. Even if I didn’t, preserving my stubborn desire to create is a way of safeguarding my son’s individuation. Without it, the mother instinct in me threatens to cannibalize us both. There’s an elegance and artfulness in knowing when to turn away from him and when to return.

Motherhood is the recognition that I’m standing on perpetually shaky ground, which does not lend itself to bold declaratives about who I am and what I think now. I can trace parallels between being an artist and being a mother that give me hope. Both require a beginner’s mind—a feeling of humility in the face of something you don’t understand and can’t control. Both require attention and love. Even when you’re depleted, you find a way to give it. “The gift of love always transcends the plane of the object because it is never a gift of something we possess, but a gift of that which we do not have, of that which we ourselves radically lack,” says Recalcati. In time, slowly, clumsily, something new grows.