Now what was I gonna do?

We’ve all done it.  Walked into a room only to forget what we were going to do once we get there.  I always chalked these mommy brain farts up to becoming a parent, but it turns out, it’s not my fault!  It’s just my brain doing its job.

Turns out that according to a new study recently published in the "Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology," the very act of walking through a doorway causes our brains to need to work overtime to understand and contextualize the new environment we have just entered, causing us to forget why we entered the new environment in the first place.  It’s called the “location-updating effect.”  The doorway acts as the “event boundary,” and the change in surroundings makes it difficult for our memories to retrieve our motivation for going there.  

I have a theory that passing through baby gates doubles or triples the effect.  Crawling underneath a jungle gym or passing through a play structure in hot pursuit of my daughter practically gives me amnesia.  I’ve whammed my head a few times doing just that, which just compounds the situation.  Seeing stars, I’m lucky to remember who I am at all after a particularly tiring play date.  

In the craziness of being a parent, there’s so much I forget to do.  But there is one thing I remember: I love being a mommy, and that makes all the forgetting--forgetting to eat, forgetting where I left the car keys, even forgetting to change a diaper (yikes!)--worth it.  

So if you forget, forgive yourself!  You might forget a few things here and there from time to time in the short term, but the memories that really count will last a lifetime.