Pregnancy Brain Is Real: The Dumbest Things I've Done This Trimester

Okay so — nobody warned me that “pregnancy brain” wasn’t a cute internet myth, it is a documented, ongoing hostage situation happening inside my own skull, and I would like to file a formal complaint.

Here is an honest, no-filter list of the dumbest things that have happened to me so far, offered as a public service to anyone currently mid-first-trimester wondering if they’re losing their mind. You’re not. You’re just growing a person, and apparently that person eats brain cells for breakfast.

The really annoying part is that I know exactly what this is, because I have done this before. I remember this fog from when I was pregnant with Luke — the same forgetting-a-sentence-mid-sentence, the same walking into a room and blanking on why. I genuinely thought I’d remember how bad it got and brace myself accordingly the second time around. I did not. Apparently my brain does not keep receipts on its own incompetence, because here I am, five years later, watching the exact same fog roll back in like it’s never happened to me before in my life.

I want to be clear that I am, by most normal measures, a fairly competent adult. I run this entire blog. I keep a five-year-old alive, fed, and reasonably clean on a daily basis. I have a system for everything, color-coded, laminated in my head if not on paper. And none of that mattered even a little bit the day I found the milk in the pantry, because pregnancy brain does not negotiate with your normal levels of competence. It just quietly, politely, completely overrides them, and then hands you back your keys and says good luck.

I put the milk in the pantry

Not almost. Fully. Closed the pantry door and walked away satisfied, like a job well done, the way you feel after successfully completing any small domestic task while operating on a diminished number of working brain cells. Found it forty minutes later, room temperature, betrayed, sitting there next to the crackers like it had always belonged among the dry goods.

I want to be very clear that I am, under normal circumstances, a person who alphabetizes her spice rack. This is not who I am. This is who pregnancy has made me.

I said the same sentence to Luke three times in a row

Full sentence, word for word, no idea I’d already said it, no idea he’d already answered it, twice. He finally just looked at me and said “you already asked me that, Mommy,” with the exact unimpressed tone of a man twice his age.

Being corrected on repetition by a five-year-old is a very specific kind of humbling that I did not have on my bingo card for this trimester. He has since taken to gently informing me, unprompted, whenever I repeat myself — “Mommy, you already told me that one” — with the calm patience of someone who has simply accepted that his mother’s short-term memory is now, at least temporarily, worse than his own. I am not sure which part stings more: the repetition, or the fact that my kindergartner has clearly appointed himself my memory backup system.

I drove to the grocery store for one specific thing and came home with everything except that thing

Every time. Every single time. I have started keeping the one-item list taped to my actual hand and I still, somehow, leave with seven snacks and zero of the item I went in for.

At this point I’ve accepted that grocery trips during this trimester are less “errand” and more “expedition with unpredictable outcomes.” I go in with a mission. I come home with a story.

I sat in my own parked car for twenty minutes looking for keys that don’t exist

I got in, buckled up, had somewhere to be, and then just… froze. Started patting down my pockets. Dug through my bag. Checked the cupholders, the console, under the seat, back through the bag a second time like the keys might have materialized in the thirty seconds since I last looked. Full-blown mini panic, the kind where you start mentally retracing your entire morning trying to figure out where you could possibly have left them.

Here’s the humiliating part: my car doesn’t have a key. It’s a Cybertruck — it reads my phone, unlocks itself, and starts the second I’m in the seat with my foot on the brake. There has never, not once, been a key to lose. I own the vehicle. I drive it almost every day. And I still spent twenty genuine minutes hunting for an object that does not exist, for a car I already knew did not need one, before it finally clicked and I just sat there laughing at myself in an empty driveway.

I forgot what day it was mid-sentence, out loud, to another adult

Not “what’s today’s date” — I mean I was actively saying a sentence with a day of the week in it and just… lost the word. Stood there. Blinked. The other mom waited very patiently while I rebooted.

I genuinely watched the word leave my brain in real time. There one second, gone the next, replaced with nothing but static and mild panic.

I put my phone in the fridge

I genuinely do not have an explanation for this one. I opened the fridge to put something else away, and apparently some rogue part of my brain decided a shelf was an acceptable home for a phone. Found it an hour later during a full-blown “where did I even have it last” spiral, sitting there next to the milk like it belonged — cold, slightly judgmental-looking, and somehow still with fifteen percent battery, which felt like the one small mercy of the entire ordeal.

I introduced myself to a woman I have met four separate times

School pickup. Same mom. Same spot by the fence, every single day, for weeks. And my brain, for reasons it refused to explain to me, decided that today was the day to stick out my hand and say “hi, I’m Annie!” like we were strangers at a networking event. She laughed it off — I think, mercifully, because pregnancy brain has apparently made the rounds in every mom-group text thread in this school — but I stood there afterward replaying it, mortified, wondering how many times I’d have to reintroduce myself before her name finally stuck in whatever’s left of my long-term memory.

I texted the wrong person something deeply personal

I will not repeat the exact content here, because some things are between me and the poor unsuspecting relative who received a paragraph clearly intended for Hubs. What I will say is that autocomplete and pregnancy brain are a dangerous combination, and I have since instituted a strict new rule for myself: read the recipient’s name out loud before hitting send, every single time, no exceptions, like I’m a toddler learning to look both ways before crossing the street.

I locked myself out of the house while holding the key

Not lost the key. Not forgot the key. Holding the key, in my actual hand, and somehow still pulled the door shut behind me before it registered that the key needed to go into the lock before the door closed, not congratulated silently after. I stood on my own porch for a solid ten seconds just staring at the key like it had personally betrayed me.

Why this actually happens (a little bit of the real science, briefly)

From what I’ve read, it’s a real, documented thing — hormonal shifts, sleep disruption, and your brain literally reallocating resources toward, you know, building an entire human. Some studies even show measurable changes in brain structure during pregnancy that shift focus toward caregiving and away from, apparently, remembering where the milk goes. So it’s not a character flaw. It’s biology quietly redecorating.

I find this weirdly comforting, actually, once I stop being annoyed by it. My brain is not broken. It is not betraying me for no reason. It has simply decided, without asking my permission, that growing a person and preparing me to care for that person once they arrive is a higher priority than remembering which shelf the milk goes on. When I frame it that way, the fridge incident starts to feel less like a personal failure and more like evidence that something enormous is quietly under construction behind the scenes, and my conscious brain just isn’t cleared for all the paperwork.

That doesn’t make it less funny when it happens in real time, in front of another adult, at school pickup. But it does make it easier to laugh instead of spiral, which — trimester after trimester, kid after kid — I am slowly learning is the entire game.

What’s actually helping (a little)

Writing everything down immediately, the second I think of it, because “I’ll remember” is now a flat-out lie I tell myself. I keep a running note on my phone titled, unglamorously, “REMEMBER THIS,” and I have stopped being precious about how it looks — half-finished sentences, random capital letters, one entry that just says “THE THING AT 3” with zero context, because past-me clearly trusted future-me to fill in the blanks and future-me has repeatedly let her down.

Putting my phone in the same spot every single time, on purpose, out loud — “phone goes on the counter” — like I’m narrating a toddler show for an audience of one very forgetful adult. Luke has started saying it along with me now, which is either extremely helpful or a sign that I have fully outsourced my executive function to a five-year-old. Possibly both.

And laughing about it instead of panicking about it, because it turns out fighting your own brain fog just uses up the last three brain cells you had left for the day. Every time I catch myself spiraling — what is wrong with me, why can’t I just remember one thing — I try to physically stop and reframe it instead: nothing is wrong with me, something enormous is being built, and the milk in the pantry is just the receipt.

If you’re deep in your own foggy trimester right now: you’re not broken, you’re not losing it, and no, you did not imagine putting your phone in the fridge. I believe you. I’ve been there. I am, arguably, still there, currently trying to remember where I left this exact laptop while writing this exact sentence. Grace, friend. So much grace. For both of us.