...and won't give it back.
You know those Life Alert commercials?
Mmhmm. YOU know which ones I mean.
That is the current state of my brain. There are lots of things about pregnancy I thought people played up/were kind of myths (more on that in tomorrow's post), but one of them is "pregnancy brain."
Yeah right, I thought, arrogantly. These chicks are just being lazy and don't want to try anymore because they're cookin' a baby. Can't blame them, but let's not act like the forgetfulness can't be helped.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh, pre-pregnancy Mary Catherine. How foolish you were. You simple idiot.
I'd like to offer a few pieces of anecdotal evidence that Pregnancy Brain is, in fact, a thing. For your consideration:
1. The Pants
Jordan bought (well, I bought) some things from J Crew. In the stack, there were two pairs of shorts that he didn't care for. He asked me to exchange them for a different color pair of shorts and a pair of slacks. These items have been sitting on a stool in our bedroom for probably 8 weeks now, and I finally got around to doing it this week.
I took said items to the store to exchange, only to realize that I couldn't remember his pant size. Like, at all. It was gone. It was nowhere in the system from when I worked there, so my trip was fruitless and I had to go home, look in his other pants, get the size, and go back in. It's a 32/32 by the way, which really means I only had to remember the one number, twice.
That one sounds mild, does it? Could've happened to anyone, you're thinking? Stay with me.
2. The car keys.
I recently got a new car. If you know me personally, this is a Big Deal as I have been driving the same car since my sophomore year of college (meaning almost a decade). My car had started to really die out on me - the AC was faulty, the radio didn't work, and, in its death rattle, the starter began acting up.
One fateful Saturday morning after I'd taught Pure Barre, I got into the car only to find that it wouldn't turn over. Jordan had to come get me, and since we'd already made plans to go look at cars the next day, we decided to leave the car where it was and get it the next day.
When we arrived at the car, neither of us could find the keys. Where had we put them? we both wondered. We couldn't figure it out, so we went on to the dealership and made plans to deal with the lost keys later.
The next day, I made it my personal mission to find the keys. I turned the entire house upside down. Searched through our laundry, every nook and corner, and dug through Jordan's Jeep - nothing. COMPLETE mystery.
"Did you check your pockets?" my mother asked by phone. YES, MOM, I CHECKED MY POCKETS. Come on, girl. I felt like Parker Posey in Best In Show when the hotel manager suggests she look under the bed (anyone? anyone??) for her dog's lost toy. #busybee
So eventually, we bought another car and traded my current car in. Despite the fact that it was still in the Pure Barre parking lot. Locked.
The only thing either of us could think of was that I'd locked the keys in the car that morning. So we called AAA. I'm sure this poor guy thought that we were about to hot wire this car given that he unlocked it and we were still unable to locate the keys and/or start the car. He drove away, but he looked dubious.
Jordan had to go to work, so I stayed to clean out the car. Not knowing that the last time I drove the car would be the ACTUAL last time I drove the car, I'd made no effort to tidy it up. It's not important to the story, though it might be entertaining to include that inside the car, I found the following items that I did not know were there:
- An extra key fob (still not able to start the car, but at least we could unlock it from the outside!)
- A highball glass
- A pair of Chanel sunglasses with one of the lenses missing
- A full, unopened bottle of wine
- A legal pad full of notes I'd been looking for
- A perfume bottle
- Five pairs of Pure Barre sticky socks
- An iPod shuffle
- Three cigars
You get the point. If you found those items in a car, you'd be like, "So this is an alcoholic smoker who sometimes works out? Mmkay."
Anyway, as I was cleaning out the ruins of my life, it started to rain. I pulled on my rain jacket and put my wallet in my pocket so that I could walk to Domino's and get a pizza to stress-eat by myself and...
...touched something. Metal. And clinky.
The keys. They were in the pocket of the raincoat I'd been wearing that morning. Which means not only am I a moron, but MY MOTHER WAS RIGHT!
3. The pound cake
Last week, I needed to make a pound cake as a thank you gift for a weekend trip we'd recently been gifted. I thought, "This will be a snap. I've done this a billion times." I FaceTime'd my mom, started chatting, and got to work.
I laid all the ingredients out - eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla, lemon extract, Crisco (YEP. CRISCO. Deal with it.), etc. Started creaming everything together. Talking away, blah blah blah, got it done in a jiff, put it in the oven, and sat back to wait for the house to fill with that fabulous baking smell. I cleaned up all my ingredients, wiped my counters, and congratulated myself.
But it didn't smell fabulous. It didn't smell like anything except scrambled eggs cooking.
I looked in on the cake and saw that it was sunken. This has happened to me before - I accidentally shut our back door too hard while baking once and it collapsed - so I thought, "Eh. Whatever. We'll see."
Anyway, thirty minutes later, I looked in to find that the center of the cake was still completely raw. Odd I thought. I'll let it bake a little longer, I guess.
Twenty minutes later, the blackened scorch of failure wafted through the house.
"What the HELL??" I said aloud to Tom Hanks.
Turns out I forgot to put flour in the cake. Despite getting the flour out and setting it with the other ingredients and putting it back into the pantry with the other ingredients, it did not occur to me that I had not actually put the flour in the batter. So, I basically made custard, and then burned the custard. Then threw it away. Then went to the store and bought a cake.
Friends, these are things that, despite my spazzy and oft-forgetful nature, would have NEVER HAPPENED had this baby not crawled into my brain stem, torn it in half, kidnapped my mind and held it hostage in my uterus. I can't even access normal thought anymore. I couldn't remember John Hughes' name the other day. JOHN FREAKING HUGHES, director of the 80's canon of classics such as The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles. I can't remember anything about Jordan's work schedule. I asked a friend when she was due (she'd already had the baby). I asked a co-worker how her mother-in-law was doing who'd recently fallen ill (it was her father-in-law). I left the house without Tom Hanks to TAKE THE DOG TO THE PARK.
I've surrendered to it. Whatever. This is my life now.
"Oh, sweetie, it only gets worse," knowing moms say to me with a smile.
That's cute, lady. Thanks for the looming reminder that I'll never be able to effectively bake/speak/interact with other humans normally again.
Oooooo, this baby better be cute is all I'm sayin'.