Nappy Rot

“I read somewhere that you lose 3 per cent of you brain volume while pregnant.”
Anne Enright, Making Babies, Stumbling into Motherhood

You’ve been trying to ignore it but the fact is something strange has happened to your brain. Without you noticing, it seems to have shrunk to the point where you have become an imbecile. Perhaps it’s something to do with breastfeeding: the baby is literally sucking the sense out of you, draining the brain’s lubricant away, turning your thinking tackle into a dried up old lump of grey stodge. Or maybe it’s been so long that you were approached for advice, since anyone canvassed your opinion on anything outside the domestic realm, that the synapses have rusted up. In any case, it becomes clear when Manchild is writing a job application that something is amiss.

“That’s weird,” he says, staring at the computer monitor.

“What?” you ask, shifting baby from one boob to the other.

“How do you spell ‘obstensively‘? It keeps getting highlighted on the spellchecker.”

“Let me see.” You scan the word, the sentence, the context and are equally baffled. “Looks fine. Get the dictionary.”

He goes upstairs and brings down the hefty brick. You hand him the baby while you flick through.

“Gosh, that is weird,” you conclude. “‘Obstensively’ isn’t listed in the dictionary. You look at each other in confusion. It takes a while for the penny to drop.

“Hang on, it’s ‘ostensively’, not ‘obstensively’,” you announce, relieved that your intelligence and insight are still intact. You flick forward a couple of pages and run your finger down the margins.

“Oh, erm… well, nearly right. Mmmm,” you trail off. “Well, it’s here. That’s the spelling.

‘Ostensibly’. Is that what you were looking for?”

“Can you look up something else while you’re at it?”

“What’s that then?”

“Nappy rot. A brain disorder. It’s an affliction of the newly parented.”

“Ha, ha. Well, at least it’s not just me that’s got it.”