The Female Brain, Discovering Woman
- Author
- Louann Brizendine (author)
- Publisher
- Reader's Book | Published 2007-06-18
- Category
- Self-help
- Book intro
- The 1% secret that the female brain has and the male brain doesn't. The female brain, ...
Maybe I only talked about things from when I was too young; after writing the piece, I was left with a lot of regret. I wanted to talk about my mother too. I wanted to talk about motherhood, and there were also a few things I could say about adolescent girls but couldn't, so the reason I'm trying to write part.2 is that I want to write about my mother, who from the time I was born endured stress while feeling happiness thanks to enormous amounts of oxytocin. I don't know exactly what my mother thought and what emotions she felt while raising me. In my infancy, when testosterone overflowed and I touched everything, explored my surroundings, and didn't listen well just like girls do, breaking the fish tank and smashing the TV's cathode-ray tube while running all over the place, with what kind of gaze did she look at me.....
It's true that modern women have a very limited amount of time to raise children. For an adult woman with a job, she has to go out to work at least about five days a week, and maternity leave is at most around five months. Well, there are jobs, like teachers, that give one or two years of maternity leave, but such jobs are very rare. My mother was a teacher. Hmm.... so I think she may have had more time to attend to me than mothers with other jobs. The start of that process can be said to be 'childbirth.' They say that after giving birth, the female brain remembers the smell of the baby's head when she first sniffs it. Through 'mirroring behavior,' the mother picks up on most of the child's every gesture, finger shape, and facial expression. In doing so, she gradually understands what emotions the child feels and what it's thinking, and rapidly imprints that in her mind. My mother probably wanted, through mirroring, to shape me into the image of the child she desired. Hmm.... in any case, once a 'woman' has a child, she begins to pour all her attention onto the child, and the amount of oxytocin and dopamine she gains through bonding with the child surpasses the level of taking drugs, while at the same time her interest in her husband becomes nearly nonexistent. In that process, whether the husband gains happiness by secreting vasopressin and taking interest in the child seems to be determined by exactly what genes the husband carries. Hormones and genes are very closely related, because if there's an abnormality in the genes that causes an abnormality in hormone secretion, the mother needs to cover the stress she gets from her relationship with the child through 'oxytocin' secretion, and when that starts not working, the relationship between child and mother is, needless to say, obvious. Fortunately, I was on the blessed side, and my mother watched over me with a great deal of attention.
My mother's brain is probably now gradually being redesigned in the direction of minimizing the bond with her children. My younger sibling has gained a degree of independence upon becoming a college student, and I had already done so. Probably, if we assume that the part she maintained the relationship with my father for the sake of 'the children' was large, then that reason is gradually fading away. So the fact that my mother is working so hard to become a principal can also be said to be a kind of movement toward self-realization. Although it's not quite like when she taught me ('Live with the conviction to say what must be said even with a blade at your throat.'), her seasoning and wisdom are far above mine, aren't they.
Later, when I marry someone and have a child, I'll surely feel jealousy toward that child. But although it's true that the amount of vasopressin the other person gains through the child is greater, I too could produce it if I tried. A man with genes recording that raising a child is the work of two people probably wouldn't find his relationship with his wife all that frustrating. Even if, through the relationship with the child, the woman's oxytocin increases while her sex drive disappears and she doesn't even glance at her husband at all!!
The existence of a 'grandmother' is, hmm..... if I had to pick one of the biggest reasons, the fact that she becomes a 'mother' stand-in?? They say that whether grandfather or grandmother, seeing their daughter's or son's children evokes yet another emotion. My grandmother, though she's no longer here now, was one of the people who poured boundless attention onto me. Because my mother and father had jobs, I belonged to the category of children who would be alone after school, but fortunately, in that empty space were my grandmother and grandfather. You can see how valuable a woman's existence is when you look at the oxytocin she gains from caring for grandchildren even in old age. That's why even now I can't forget those two. It was my grandmother and grandfather who took me to school, and it was my grandmother and grandfather who fed me when I came home from school and gave me their attention. Sometimes I'd even sleep beside them, and during the holidays we always spent time together, so it feels somehow regrettable..... It's just regrettable that they left too early.
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