I Said It: Gifting Toys Should Be Stopped
January 5, 2026
I was in the middle of a meeting when it happened. A word stalled. Something related to our current content strategy. It was embarrassingly unreachable for a second longer than felt acceptable. I smiled, filled the pause with a joke, and said what comes easily in these moments.
Sorry, mom brain.
The conversation moved on. It always does. The phrase landed softly enough to require no response. It did its job. It excused the pause and quietly diminished whatever was behind it.
Later, when the day finally slowed and whined down, and I had space to replay it in my head (all embarrassing moments do), the sentence felt heavier than it should have. I felt bad for the mother in me for demeaning itself by calling that linguistic lapse mom brain.
What my brain had already carried that day
By the time I logged into that meeting, my mind had been working for hours in ways no agenda ever captures. In ways only mothers and main parents can.
Breakfast had already been prepared, eaten, partially rejected, mentally logged. (Ah, he doesn’t blue cabbage tamagoyaki. Noted. What else can I prepare without defaulting to sausage? for breakfast?) I’d registered how much he drank, whether that cough sounded like yesterday’s or something new, whether the raspiness warranted concern or just observation.
The weather had been checked and rechecked, not for me, but for him. Temperature, wind, humidity, all translated into layers. Too much meant sweat. Too little meant cold fingers and feet or worse a cold later. Somewhere in between was the narrow margin of getting it right. For an immigrant mom who until now hadn’t perfected layering for winter for herself.
I’d noticed his pants were shorter again. Not dramatically, just enough to signal that another transition was approaching. That information didn’t go anywhere visible. It stayed inside my head, filed under things to deal with soon.
Eggs were running low. A pediatrician appointment approaching to have the cough checked. A mental reshuffling of tasks that would need to happen because childcare and work never quite line up the way calendars pretend they do. And the biggest mental load as a working mom doubling as the main parent is this: Calculating his waking hours and aligning them all with tasks at hand and making sure he is already happily napping when an afternoon meeting starts. On top of thinking three meals a day. This is my reality: Monday to Friday.
All of this had already passed through my mind before anyone asked for my input on strategy.
So when the word hesitated, it wasn’t because my brain had gone quiet. It was because it hadn’t.
The work that has no edges
Over the holiday, after a long, cold, joyful day of sledding as a family, while waiting for the train home, I told my husband I still had to meal-prep once we got home.
My husband didn’t understand the urgency.
“We still have food,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong. We had dinner. We had leftovers. We had enough for now.
But my mind wasn’t sitting in now. It rarely does. It was already stepping through the coming days—breakfasts before work, lunches that would need to exist even if meetings ran long, dinners shaped around a small child’s rhythm and preference rather than adult appetite.
This isn’t foresight that announces itself as labor. It doesn’t look like effort. It just quietly occupies space. Mentally.
We both work. But I am the one who knows how many meals are coming before the next break in routine. I am the one who feels the tension when nothing is prepared and everything becomes urgent at once.
That awareness doesn’t switch off when the kitchen is clean.
So I told him, “You’re only thinking about a meal in advance. I’m thinking nine.”
The knowledge that had to be built from scratch
Some layers sit beneath everything else.
I did not grow up preparing a child for cold months. Where I come from, the year moves between sun and rain. Heat is familiar. Humidity is expected. Typhoons arrive loudly and leave just as clearly when it is a cute one. But the deadly ones? We don’t have winter; but unluckily we have category 5 typhoons.
Cold works differently. Here, the colder months stretch. They ask for anticipation rather than reaction. They arrive early, linger, and shift slowly. They require planning long before they are fully felt. My mind learned how cold settles into small bodies. How wind changes everything. How dampness lingers even when the sky looks clear.
It learned fabrics and layers, not as abstract knowledge, but through daily adjustment. Through mornings that started one way and afternoons that ended another. Through noticing when fingers stayed cold too long or when movement became heavy under too many layers.
It learned about shoes meant for uneven ground, for wet leaves, for surfaces that never quite dry. Shoes that had to protect without restricting, insulate without throwing off balance.
Each decision stayed with me. What worked. What failed quietly. What showed up later as discomfort, short naps, early tears. The next season never arrived clean. It carried the residue of the last.
Being a first-generation immigrant means there is no inherited sense of rhythm for these months. No internal calendar that knows when preparation should begin or end.
Cold seasons stop being weather. They become systems that need tending. None of this announces itself as effort. There are no milestones, no acknowledgment. The knowledge simply stays active, layered on top of everything else, waiting to be used again.
Fog, fatigue, and the cost of not resting
Sleep, or the lack of it, sits underneath everything.
Months of broken nights do not pass through a body without consequence. If anyone else lived in this kind of cumulative sleep debt, we would expect their focus to waver. We would name it as fatigue, as strain, as something requiring care. We never call it mom brain.
But motherhood reframes it as a personal shortcoming.
Add postpartum recovery. Add perimenopause. Add the hormonal recalibrations that quietly affect memory, processing speed, emotional regulation. And still, we laugh it off with a phrase that makes it sound trivial. Mom brain.
The sharpness that doesn’t happen by accident
Someone told me recently that I still seem sharp. I don’t know how to measure that. What I do know is how intentional it is. I write because it keeps my mind articulated. I read because it reminds me that my thoughts extend beyond logistics. I protect my me time the way I protect essentials, because without it, everything else dulls. I was so scared of losing myself to motherhood, that I deliberately calendared my writing and reading hours. Like real appointments. Because they are.
On top of these calendared appointments, Saturday afternoons are mine. Four to five hours where I am not anticipating needs, not managing meals, not holding household systems together. Where I sit in the neighborhood library and write, read, diary. And once that closes, I go to my usual cafe to do the same thing. And I became a regular in two book clubs I joined.
No, this is not indulgence. This is an upkeep, an intentional self-care that mothers need and much so deserve.
Language matters
When I return to that meeting in my mind, the pause no longer reads as a shortcoming. But I reminded myself to never call it mom brain again. Because a mom brain carries layers of responsibility at once. Present demands running alongside future preparation. Sensory awareness, emotional tracking, logistical planning, all operating simultaneously.
The term mom brain has been used to suggest absence. A flaw. A weakness. As though something essential has thinned or faded.
I want to shift that definition. Mom brain looks less like loss and more like excess. A cognitive state shaped by holding, anticipating, and remembering on behalf of more than one body. A brain trained to keep systems running while adapting to constant change. A machine that can’t rest, even if it wants to.
It tracks nourishment and sleep while monitoring growth. It plans meals while reading moods. It prepares for seasons, appointments, transitions, and needs that have not yet announced themselves.
That kind of mental load asks for flexibility rather than speed. It favors continuity over sharp edges.
A pause fits naturally inside that architecture.
So, yes, mom brain deserves recognition as the only brain capable of doing this much at once. Admirably so.
And when it does falter, we pause, take a deep breath, and give ourself the grace and kindness we all need and deserve.
