Mud & Mayhem

There was a time — and I remember it fondly — when I could sit down and watch a three hour movie from start to finish without so much as a bathroom break. Titanic. All of it. Every minute of that ship sinking and I was locked in, fully committed, emotionally present for the whole thing.

That person is gone.

I don’t know exactly when it happened. I don’t know if it’s the ADHD, the mom brain, the parent exhaustion, or some unholy combination of all three that has fundamentally rewired my ability to consume content. What I do know is that I currently cannot watch anything longer than approximately thirty minutes before my brain quietly closes a tab and moves on.

Here is how it goes now. The kids go to bed. That first exhale of silence — and every parent knows exactly what I mean, that specific brand of quiet that feels like a gift from the universe — it’s glorious. Nobody is screaming. Nobody needs anything. The house is still. You have a window. Somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half before sleep becomes non-negotiable and you absolutely must get some rest to function tomorrow.

So you decide to use it well. You pick a movie. You’ve been meaning to watch it. You’ve heard good things. You sit down, you get comfortable, and then approximately twenty five minutes in you are either paused, asleep, or mentally somewhere else entirely and you cannot explain why because the movie is actually good.

We just watched Project Hail Mary. Genuinely incredible. One of the best endings I have seen in years — everything landed exactly right, beautifully done all around. We watched it in two parts because we physically could not stay awake through the whole thing in one sitting. A movie that good. Two sittings. That’s where we are.

And the thing is — it’s not even that I’m bored. It’s that my brain has apparently recalibrated its entire attention threshold to match the runtime of a Bluey episode and anything beyond that requires active effort to sustain.

I used to think it was just the exhaustion. But I’ve had full nights of sleep and still found myself pausing something forty minutes in just to check my phone for no reason. So now I’m wondering if there’s something more to it. Is this what happens to your brain after years of being permanently half-available? Of always having one ear on — waiting for someone to wake up, waiting for something to need you — that you simply lose the ability to be fully off?

Is there a scientific answer to this or is it just a personal problem? Because I would genuinely like to watch a movie again. Start to finish. In one sitting. Like a person.

Someone tell me I’m not alone in this. And if you’ve cracked the code on how to get it back, drop it in the comments — I will read every single word of it. Probably in two sittings but I will finish it.

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Is this mom brain, ADHD, parent exhaustion, or just the new normal? Drop your theory in the comments.