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A study published in the
journal Physiology & Behavior last month calls the experience
“maternal induced neural plasticity.” I call it “Don’t mess with
Mom.”
The first time I knew I was
witnessing some kind of mom phenomenon was on a winter evening when
my son was 4. I had herded him and my daughter to a fast-food joint
for snacks, to burn off a little energy in the play area, and, most
importantly, to give my wife a well deserved break.
A good time was had by all –
until my son knocked out a tooth while thrashing around the ball
pit. I didn’t freak out, exactly, though I would have left their
shoes behind if my 5-year-old daughter hadn’t snagged them.
I burst through the door of
our house to grab my medical insurance card and found my wife
chatting on the phone, casually sipping a cup of herbal tea. I
stood in the kitchen, minus the kids, shirt splattered with blood,
and unable to think of anything to say but “Hang up.” This I
stammered repeatedly until she did.
We’d been gone ten minutes.
In seconds my wife pried a
marginally coherent explanation out of me, snatched and filled an
ice pack, pocketed the insurance card, and whisked me back to the
car. I drove to the hospital while she comforted our son and sang
songs with our daughter. To passersby we looked more like a family
on an outing than a basket-case father taking his gap-toothed son to
the emergency room.
Now it turns out that
motherhood makes females smarter, braver, and calmer under
pressure. Dr. Craig Kinsley of the University of Richmond conducted
his research using rats, apparently too chicken to mess with human
moms, but feels his findings apply equally to people.
Reuters
reports that Kinsley and his team stressed the rats by placing them
in a clear Plexiglas tube and subjecting them to bright lights,
which, intentionally or not, sounds a lot like a hospital maternity
room. The mother rats endured the test patiently while the non-moms
acted much like I did the first time I watched my oldest child
alone. (No teeth were lost, though I did grit mine down a bit.)
In another
test, rats were given a cricket to eat. According to Kinsley, “The
virgin females are clueless. They don’t know what to do. They
can’t find the thing. Lactating animals can snag it; it takes them
like a minute.” Now that I think of it, my wife did stop asking me
to kill bugs for her shortly after the kids were born.
The
discovery of bravery was not unexpected since mother animals are
known to get vicious when their broods are threatened. The extent
to which rat moms became more resourceful, as when finding and
eating a cricket, was a surprise but shouldn’t be. Any child who
has been on the receiving end of a spit bath could tell you that.
While
Kinsley notes “There’s something about pregnancy and subsequent
exposure to offspring that create a more adaptive brain,”
researchers did not pin down the exact cause. Whatever the reason,
the area of mother rats’ brains that produce fear were found to be
less active than in other rats, and Kinsley thinks the change is
permanent. I believe it; I have noticed that no matter how
miserable a new mother’s pregnancy or labor has been, most decide to
have another child sooner or later. If it’s not courage it must be
amnesia.
Few who
are mothers, live with a mother, or have a mother, will be surprised
by the study’s results. Coming on the heels of four decades of
motherhood bashing, it is good to hear just the same.
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