The holographic mind of motherhood

On mom brain and other phase changes

Every night it’s the same thing.

I have the highest intentions of writing, meditating, reading that heady non-fiction book, or listening to the online class I signed up for…

And every night, it doesn’t happen.

By the end of the day most days my brain simply can’t hold its form. It feels like a soap bubble, stretched beyond its own surface tension, breaking into a rainbow slick again.

Every night I collapse into a wave.

There’s so much shame in our culture around “mom brain,” the particular kind of brain-wave that takes over once you’re using so much of your consciousness to intimately track the entire existence of another creature. The mixed media result of moving through the profound phase-change of matrescence, a time when your brain literally cuts away the synaptic connections you no longer need—a kind of mid-existence pruning when the entire world tree of your brain pathways are recreated.

There’s so much shame in the fact that we can’t remember it all anymore.

Or struggle to put concepts into full sentences.

Or recall that specific word (it’s on the tip of my tongue)…

But what if we saw it differently? What if we understood that the magnificent brain-change that you experience when you birth a child isn’t a diminishing… but simply a phase change from particle to wave?

I remember when I first read The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot in my twenties. It made a big impression on me.

In the book, Talbot talks about the understanding in quantum physics that physical reality isn’t, well, entirely physical. Through studying the smallest building blocks of matter, quantum physics has shown that the elements that make up our world aren’t just a particle (a stationary fixed thing) or a wave (a moving frequency), but both at the same time. And that only when it’s observed does a subatomic element moves from its wave state into its particle solidity.

It’s a reflection of a truth many of us feel without needing science or names. The reality that all of life is built upon a non-physical wave of energy we call consciousness, and that’s it’s only when our own consciousness looks to, gazes on, decides to focus within, reality that the physical world as we know it is created.

We prize particles and particle-like thinking in our culture. Objects, nouns, stuff. The tangible, the effective, the direct. The physical certainty over the non-physical mystery. The clearly defined versus the watery.

And yet, this is not the ground of existence.

Motherhood is a phase change back into the mother-wave that is consciousness itself. And there’s a particular reality-creating magic that happens when we simply embrace it.

Everyone told me my brain would change when I became a mom. I started to notice it when I was pregnant, but it didn’t full shapeshift until my daughter arrived. At first, it was fine. I was in the postpartum haze and gave myself full permission to not have to think too clearly.

But now that we’re nearly two years in, I notice I’m still not able to hold onto thoughts like I used to. I process information differently. I let connections slip slide through my mind. They’re there, and then they’re not, and I let them go.

I’m a wave.

Most of the time I accept the tide of being pulled by the moon of my child’s existence in this world, my consciousness flowing here and there and back again, but I still sometimes experience particle-like focus. I feel it arrive like a shaft of sunlight piercing the water—potent and brief.

When I need to, when it’s truly important, when there’s some piece of my soul at stake, I can suddenly sit down and become solid again, focusing intently, sharply, more completely than ever before, to bring something into reality.

I shock myself sometimes with the force of the arrival, what I can birth in the scant hour a day I have to be a particle.

And then night comes again, and I let myself fall back into the wave.

As much as we’re taught that this isn’t the most effective or desirable state to be in…

As much as we’re told to struggle against it, to swim, to get to a destination—I’m at my happiest and most content, when I simply let myself float.

When I embrace the wave for what it is.

A wave is mystery; it moves quickly even as it seems to stand still. It carries immense energy—from one side of the galaxy to another.

A wave is poetry, made more of the spaces in-between than what is said.

A wave is consciousness without words, an origin point we return to again and again.

It’s the amniotic state that lulls us back into the original container-less nature of our own souls.

So on the days when I’m frustrated with my brain for the wave that it is, I remind myself of this—

Waves are tethers that connect us to the deeper ocean of reality.

And even though we have language now for things like particle, wave, quantum— we don’t actually need them to understand the deeper tones of what it means to be alive.

We don’t need it—because we can feel it.

We are nurtured by it.

We are it—falling asleep, waking up, caring for our child, writing a poem, collapsing.

We bend in and out of existence, in and out of the realm of spirit, in and out of the prima materia of life itself.

We are the wave.

And if we can stop long enough to rest, we’ll be carried by it.