I sometimes feel like I have lost ten IQ points per child. If my husband and I ever have a fourth, I might have to quit writing altogether and find a less cognitively demanding line of work – maybe run for political office. The causes of “mommy brain” are disputed. Studies have shown that, after she gives birth, certain parts of a woman’s brain become more active while others shrink. Once this was thought to be a result of temporary hormone changes, but now scientists believe that pregnancy causes a woman’s brain to be permanently restructured. Even years after their children’s births, mothers’ brains still show a reduction in gray matter volume. A scan of my brain would doubtless look like an aerial map of North Korea and South Korea, with a black expanse in the region responsible for retaining new information but a lively skyline in the region that invents creative answers to unexpected questions. The five-year-old, our eldest, is a fount of these.
The five-year-old and I recently had a long conversation about invasive species after he saw me kill a spotted lanternfly. The rule in our house is that we don’t squish bugs or spiders for no reason, so I explained that these bugs didn’t belong here, they came over by accident on a ship from Asia and they were throwing the local ecosystem out of balance. You know how Daddy is from Australia? I continued. Well, Australia had a problem with invasive rabbits from England that were eating all the plants and leaving nothing for the wombats and the wallabies, so the government released a virus that killed all the rabbits. Having summoned the image of a rabbit hecatomb, I hastily explained that little boys and girls who had pet rabbits could take them to the vet for a vaccine to protect them from the virus. Here the five-year-old jumped in. What would happen if a group of wild rabbits went to a vet and pretended to be someone’s pets in order to get the vaccine? I told him that would make a good plot for a movie. He was off and running like a Hollywood VP of development. The wild rabbits would need to have a domesticated rabbit friend to explain the whole vaccine situation to them. The movie can’t end with them just returning to the Outback, because they are still an invasive species, so we’d need to get them on to a ship back to England. Maybe a native mammal could show them the devastation caused by out-of-control rabbit overpopulation and they would decide to go home on their own.
Australia is unique among the nations of the world in its willingness to use extreme measures to control pest animals. One of the government zoologists responsible for Australia’s rabbit control program wrote that his European counterparts were constantly telling him that the public in their countries would never approve plans like the ones he managed every day. Polls confirm this. Compared to Europeans, Australians are less susceptible to sentimental animal rights appeals about poor little bunnies. The zoologist attributed this to the Australian character, shaped by an unforgiving continent far from civilization where survival required a pragmatic approach to life. Australians are also keenly aware that they are the world champions of biodiversity and their country the only place on Earth for bilbies, wombats and kangaroos. Listening to my five-year-old discuss myxomatosis and calicivirus, I thought: the Australian character must be genetic.
The culture clash of raising an Australian child has been greater than I thought it would be – and I don’t just mean that all three of our children have inherited a love of Vegemite. One thing you have to know about Australians is they love pranks. Something about the larrikin spirit. When our eldest was only four, I explained to him the concept of April Fool’s Day and after that, for months, he asked on an almost daily basis if it was “prank day” yet. He brainstormed a dozen different ideas and together we refined them into high-quality gags. The one we eventually chose started with a basic food swap. He had the idea of putting whipped cream instead of sour cream on Daddy’s taco. This grew more elaborate as the weeks progressed until we had an entirely fake decoy taco: strawberry chunks instead of tomato, shredded coconut instead of cheese, mint instead of cilantro and chocolate-covered marshmallows instead of chicken in a mole poblano sauce.
I wanted our son’s first April Fool’s prank to go well, so I did all the food preparation out of Dad’s sight. Our son assembled the regular tacos and the gag one so they would look indistinguishable. Some anticipatory giggles from the little prankster probably clued Papa in to the idea that something was up, but overall he reacted with a satisfying look of surprise. Our son was delighted. I thought, if I have enough brain cells to help him pull that off, that’s enough.
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