Your Basal Ganglia Take You on a Route That Does Not Include Your Child
Non-Fiction by Adrienne Gruber
I slam the door and immediately hear the beep of the key fob from inside the car, having tossed the keys in the front seat while strapping my youngest into her car seat. I know before I can confirm the knowing, before I start yanking desperately on the car handles, my neck prickling. My daughter’s eyes are wide, assessing my reaction, determining how to react herself. She knows something is wrong and starts to struggle, only to feel the constraints of the straps of her car seat. She starts to scream as I turn and sprint from the car back to daycare.
I’ve locked my thirteen-month-old in the car.
The biometrics and thermodynamics of babies and cars mix together to create a lethal cocktail. Known as Vehicular Hyperthermia, heat builds quickly in a small space and babies bake like bread. The body produces or absorbs more heat than it can dissipate. Once the body reaches a certain temperature, cells become damaged and organs shut down. A child’s thermoregulation is immature and their body’s internal temperature will rise three to five times faster than an adult’s. An hour or two in a hot car can cause permanent damage — or even death — to a child.
“Two decades ago, this was relatively rare,” Gene Weingarten writes in a 2009 Washington Post article. “But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear.”
This unintentionally created a whole new safety phenomenon for babies — Forgotten Baby Syndrome. Parents could no longer glance in the rear-view mirror and see their child. Out of sight, out of mind.
Parents often describe the weeks and months postpartum as a fog. By the time our first daughter was born, my husband and I had both been awake for thirty-six hours straight. My husband went to work the next morning and briefly fell asleep standing up at a urinal. I was averaging about three or four hours of sleep a night for the first six weeks. By the time our daughter was three months old, we were shells of our former selves.
While we managed to help our baby thrive, and even went on to have another one two years later, we knew luck played a part. There are so many variables to keeping a child alive. Parents live with sleep-deprivation, chaos, and the anxiety of responsibility; the gutting realization that it is all on us. Their tiny lives rely completely on our ability to keep all the balls in the air at once.
When we hit our late twenties, the brain’s aging process begins and neurons decrease. Receptors are slower to fire. New parenthood also impacts brain matter, jumpstarting a process called ‘synaptic pruning’, which is the brain’s way of removing connections that are no longer needed. The basal ganglia, a group of structures found deep within the cerebral hemispheres, function on a subconscious level through repeated activities — your ability to remember how to ride a bicycle, for example. In the case of driving to work, your basal ganglia want you to get from Point A to Point B, to the degree that they can override other parts of your brain.
The basal ganglia allow you to operate on autopilot.
Memory loss runs in my family. My maternal grandmother had mid-stage dementia for much of her elderly life, though she wasn’t officially diagnosed until she was in her late eighties. When she finally received brain scans, it was determined that one third of her brain had atrophied, the remainder floating gently in fluid and dissolving slowly with each passing day. My own mother struggles to remember details of conversations or past events. She adapts and works around this by documenting important interactions. She’s an expert note-taker.
Before having children, I was confident in my memory. I recalled conversations, important dates, and events with ease. I chalked up any instances of forgetfulness to environmental stresses, or a stretch of clinical depression. Pregnancy changed all of this. The early stages weren’t too bad, but towards the end of my first pregnancy I was forgetting everything. Most of it was laughable, endearing. My husband would tease me about the way I loaded the dishwasher, as though I was creating an art installation — a plate wedged at an angle, a pot on top of the plate.
I was willing to chalk my memory loss up to pregnancy hormones, but when it worsened post-partum, I worried. I lost my keys six times in the first few months of my daughter’s life. I misplaced important papers. Worst of all, I was completely inarticulate. There were times I could hardly string three or more words together to form a complete sentence. Experts call this ‘Baby Brain,’ which sounds cute, but I began to feel more of a kinship with those who’d experienced a brain trauma, or those immersing themselves in a new language. My head would pound. My tongue twitched. I ached to speak about my experiences, my feelings of identity loss in this newly acquired motherhood role.
My essence drifted helplessly inside me as though my body was an aquarium, as though my own brain was liquefying just like my Granny’s.
The scenarios are simple and heart wrenching and none of us are exempt. Of the ones I’ve read, two continue to haunt me.
A man drives past his son’s daycare on his way to the office. He’s on a work call and his wife usually drops off their child, but she had an early meeting. He parks the car at work and doesn’t notice the baby, who’s fallen asleep still strapped into the car seat. Within a couple of hours the interior of the car doubles in temperature from the summer heat. The man’s car alarm goes off multiple times within that first hour, likely due to the baby’s struggling. The man hears it from his office window, but because he believes his child is at daycare, he eventually disables the alarm, annoyed by how sensitive it is. After work, he notices a crowd gathering around his car and assumes there’s been a break-in. He approaches the car, irate at the commotion. It is only when he arrives that he realizes his son is dead in the backseat.
A woman thinks she’s dropped her son off already, but she’s only taken her husband to work. The baby is dozing silently in the backseat with a cold. The diaper bag isn’t in the front seat like it usually is. It’s a perfect storm of circumstances. She misses the first call from the daycare because she’s in a meeting and the call goes to voicemail. The daycare calls again, inquiring where her child is. She’s confused. What do you mean? He’s with you. By the time she gets to the car, it has become an efficient oven. Crayons strewn on the floor have melted from the heat. Her son’s forehead is a broiled moon.
Forgotten Baby Syndrome, like many afflictions, does not discriminate on the basis of race, class, or gender. Any sleep-deprived, stressed-out parent who takes a slight detour from their usual routine is at risk.
“If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child...” Weingarten concludes, “well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?”
Quite a few, it turns out.
In 2019 alone there were fifty-three deaths in the US due to pediatric vehicular heat-stroke, and those numbers are higher than in previous years. There’s little published data on incidents in Canada, though according to information provided from coroners’ offices and government agencies collected by Paediatrics & Child Health, six cases of vehicular hyperthermia deaths were confirmed since 2013. The stories are painful to read. In the worst cases, babies pull out all their hair.
There are cardiac arrhythmias and skin slippage, when blisters form underneath the skin. Seizures and swelling of the brain. Organ failure. It is a grotesque way to die.
While it is horrifying to read about what happens to these babies, I can’t help but fixate on the parent who lives in the psychological agony of what their own exhausted brain has unknowingly allowed them to do.
I’m not immune to the possibility of forgetting my child in the car. How can my brain not trick me when I’m borderline delirious from sleep deprivation, burnout, and anxiety?
When my middle daughter, Tamsin, was two, she began waking between 4:30 and5:00 a.m. During the day she would scream to the point where I wondered if toddlers could give their parents post traumatic stress disorder. This went on for months.
One afternoon, to avoid another Old Testament level meltdown, I searched for something to distract her in the car while we ran errands. The backseat floor was littered with the inevitable goldfish crackers and random toys, but I felt around the wreckage for a bottle of Advil I knew was there. Tamsin loved shaking it and hearing the rattle of the pills inside. The twenty to thirty minutes of rage screaming that was sure to follow if I didn’t hand over the bottle, combined with the desperation for a coffee, convinced me there was no way she could open it.
Together we drove around the city, checking off items on my to-do list while I sipped an Americano and she shook the Advil bottle the entire morning, happy as could be. From then on, I let her hold that bottle during every car ride we took, and the sound of the pills clattering inside became a soothing, familiar interlude.
One afternoon, we arrived home from a play date and I opened the back door to discover my daughter covered in small red pills that littered her lap like candy. She held one in each hand and looked at me quizzically. I rushed her upstairs and called poison control. The kind nurse who answered inquired gently for Tamsin’s age and weight, asked how many pills were in the bottle and what the strength was. I lied my way through the call, telling her my daughter found the pills in the bathroom while I was in the shower, that she managed to unscrew the top somehow. I don’t know how many pills she may have swallowed, I said. Probably none, but maybe up to three or four? It turned out my daughter weighed enough that her body could handle up to twelve extra strength Advil without having to go into the hospital for a toxicity scan. The nurse reminded me of the importance of keeping all medicine locked away and completely out of reach of my children.
If it had been Tylenol, this would have been a different story, she said. I nodded into the phone.
In this case it wasn’t my memory failing. It was my exhaustion and brokenness that dictated my actions. Or maybe I’m just a shitty mom.
Tamsin is five now, and still a screamer. Her screams hijack my brain and hold it hostage. There are evolutionary reasons for this. I once looked up pictures of the brain under duress; side-by-side black and white scans showed an unpleasant response compared with a neutral response. Even the photo of the distressed brain looked like a face in pain. Screaming isn’t maladaptive, it’s purposeful. A baby’s screams may alert predators, but they’re willing to risk it, because they need, more than anything, for you to hold them. It’s an emotional and physical survival tactic.
When my daughter screams, I want to claw out my eyeballs. My amygdala is triggered and my cortisol spikes, and in those moments, I feel fucked. I’m absolutely one of those parents who could forget their child in a car; I’m human, after all, with a brain vulnerable to my environment. I am also a parent who knowingly leaves her in the car, only for a moment, just for some relief.
The fire truck shows up within minutes and the whole ordeal is over a few minutes after that. Four rescue workers pry open the driver side door with crowbars and brute strength. They work quickly and efficiently.
The fifth rescue worker waves and smiles at Dagney, saying “It’s okay, we’re gonna get you out in just a minute,” but she keeps on screaming and doesn’t stop until the door is open, the car is unlocked, and I pull her out of the car seat and into my arms, both of us a hot mess, but safe together.
“We all have young kids,” one of the rescuers piped up. “We’ve all done it.”
They forgive me easily. It wasn’t a warm day and I didn’t forget her. I was right there, playing the part of the distressed, sleep-deprived, over-worked, white cis mother, a sympathetic character. They’re kind because they think I deserve kindness. They can relate to all the moments that led up to me being careless with my car keys for a split second.
One of the men returns from the fire truck with a Dalmatian stuffy wearing a fire hat and Dagney is thrilled. This happy ending keeps me from being steeped in shame.
But the ending can go either way.
I imagine it like this: something is off about the day, there are holes in my routine, and my basal ganglia take me on a route that does not include my child. My brain fills in the gaps — the importance of the forgotten child doesn’t matter. When I fail to execute the plan, that memory is not destroyed, it’s just suppressed. I don’t stop at daycare on the way, but my brain creates a false memory of dropping my child off. Throughout the day I see pictures of my child on my desk, on my phone, on my computer. Colleagues ask about her stage of development, if she’s cruising or full-on walking. I show a video on my phone of how close she is to taking her first step. I am at work. I am productive. My child is where she belongs, safe and happy.
I am absolutely certain. »