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I Minded Four Hundred Children. Then They Stopped Leaving Me My Own Two. It Was Never My Age, It Was My Memory.
Marian Doheny ran a creche in Carlow for twenty two years. Then she was fifty five minutes late to a school gate.
Rosaleen was strapping Meabh into the back of her car when I got there.
Meabh is four. She is my granddaughter, and I collect her and her brother from that school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I have done since Oisín started in junior infants.
Rosaleen is my son in law’s mother.
“Ah, you’re grand, Marian,” she said, before I had my own car door closed. “I was only up the road.”
The gate was still busy. Six or seven parents at the railings and two teachers in the yard, and everybody there knows me, because I ran a creche in this town for twenty two years and half of them left me their children.
Oisín came over to the wall with his bag on one shoulder.
He is seven.
“Nana, we waited ages.”
Here is what had happened, and it is not complicated.
The school had moved Thursday collection an hour earlier that term for staff training. It went out on the app in September. I had it in my head at twenty to three, the way I had it for four years.
Collection was at twenty to two.
I was fifty five minutes late.
I stood at that wall and said something to Oisín about the traffic, and he took it, the way a child takes a thing off an adult, and Rosaleen said not to be worrying, and she meant it, and she drove off with the two of them because she was already loaded up.
I did not have the words to say give them back to me.
That was the last Thursday in September. I was sixty.
What I did after
I drove out the Kilkenny road and pulled in at the church at Tinryland and sat in the car.
I did not cry for a while.
What I did first was go through it like an incident report, because that is what twenty two years does to you. What time did I leave the house. What was I doing between one and two. Was there any gap in it at all.
And there was no gap. There was a perfectly ordinary Thursday in which I did a wash and had a cup of tea and looked at the clock and was satisfied with what it said.
That is the thing nobody tells you about it. You do not feel it happening.
It feels exactly like being right.
Then I thought about Oisín standing at the wall with his bag on one shoulder saying we waited ages, and about the fact that he was not giving out to me. He was telling me. And I put my head on the steering wheel.
The phone call, two weeks later
Aoife rang on a Wednesday evening about half seven.
She said they had taken a place in the creche on the Athy road for Meabh, and Oisín would go to the after school there, and it would start on the Monday.
She said it would be more structured. She said they would love it. She said it was mad how these things come up.
I said that was great.
There was no conversation. There was never going to be one, because nobody was going to say the actual sentence out loud, and I was not going to say it either.
Tuesdays and Thursdays stopped that Monday.
Four years of them. Oisín had been coming to me since he was two.
The first Tuesday I hoovered the whole house. It took forty minutes and then it was five past ten in the morning and I did not know what to do with myself.
What it had been like for two years before that
I want to be clear that the Thursday was not the beginning of it.
It had been going on for about two years and I had told nobody.
I write things on three different surfaces. The calendar on the wall, the phone, and a Post-it on the kettle. Then I check all three about four times, and the checking takes longer than the job.
I stopped reading. I had a book on the go my whole life and I would get to page forty and not be able to tell you what happened on page ten. So I stopped, and I have not said that out loud to anybody until now.
And I had spent money on it. A good deal more than I would have admitted to anyone.
Everything I had already tried
I will add it up at the end, because it matters later on.
Ginkgo biloba first, because that is what you do. Twenty two euro a month in the health food shop and I took it for eight months without missing a day. I used to leave it beside the kettle so I would not forget the thing I was taking so that I would not forget things.
Then high strength fish oil. Thirty five a month, six months.
Then one of those brain training apps. Twelve ninety nine a month and I kept it fourteen months. I got very good at the app. I got no better at anything else, and there is something desperate about a woman of fifty nine doing patterns on a phone at eleven at night.
Then an hour with a functional nutrition woman in Dublin. A hundred and forty for the consultation and ninety five for what she sold me at the end of it. I came home with a plan on a laminated sheet.
And last, a multivitamin subscription for the over fifties that I saw in an ad. Twenty nine a month. I meant to take it for three months and I paid for seven, because I forgot to cancel it. That is a joke I did not find funny at the time and I still do not.
A thousand and six euro. I sat down that October and totted it in the back of the notebook, and that is the figure.
By the end of October I had got to somewhere that is not dramatic, and that is exactly what makes it worse.
You stop expecting.
Aoife rang about something and I said “ah look, sixty is sixty.”
I heard myself saying it. I heard that it was not an explanation.
Now here is the strange part
Kitty has been in the same solicitor’s office in Carlow for forty one years.
She is sixty nine. That office handled the sale of the creche in 2023, and there is still a retention on it that has me in and out every couple of months.
She is the memory of that place. Solicitors have come and gone and Kitty can tell you what was agreed in a phone call in 2009 and what road the man lived on.
She is also the tightest woman in Carlow. She brings her lunch in a Tupperware. I have watched her stand at that counter and argue about the cost of a Land Registry search.
In November I was in about the retention and there was a jar on her desk beside the stapler. Dark glass, white label.
I did not think anything of it at all.
The taxi
Three weeks later I was back in and she was not there.
The young lad on reception said Kitty had gone out to Bagenalstown to a depot. Her car was in for the NCT, so she got a taxi.
Twenty six miles. Out and back. In a taxi.
I have known that woman since 1994. I once watched her refuse a taxi to the train station, in the rain, with a bad hip, because it was eight euro.
I stood in that reception with my folder under my arm doing the sum on it.
Whatever was in that parcel, she was not prepared to wait two more days for it.
And I thought about the jar beside the stapler.
Six of them
She was back at the desk the following Tuesday.
Her handbag was open on the floor beside her chair and the jar was sitting in the top of it, and she went down the back to the printer, which in that office is never a two minute job.
I am not going to pretend I am better than I am. I knew exactly what I was at.
That woman has had the deeds of my house in a drawer.
I twisted the cap and tipped six of them into my hand and put them in my coat pocket, and when she came back I asked her about her daughter.
I know what I did.
What is it
I read the label in the car before I started it.
MemoryPRO. Underneath in smaller print, the company. Bioprime Science.
I had never heard of it. I had never heard of them either, and I have bought every product in the health food shop on Tullow Street twice over.
Two a day with breakfast, it said. Six lasted me three days.
And on the fourth day I felt like a fool.
Because here is what I was thinking. That is a woman who has spent good money on something that does not work and burned a taxi fare over it, because people believe in whatever they have paid for.
And I went into her handbag like a child.
The conversation at the counter
I was in again a fortnight later.
She dealt with the retention and then she did not go back to her screen.
“Why did you take my capsules, Marian?”
There is no dressing that up at sixty. There is nowhere to put your hands and there is nothing to say.
I started into something and she put her hand up.
“I am not asking to make you go red. I am asking because if you want them I will get you a jar, instead of you going into my bag like one of your own three year olds.”
Then she came around the end of the counter and sat down on the visitor chair, which in forty one years I have never once seen her do, and she told me the following.
Your brain is not a container that fills up and starts leaking out the bottom.
It is connections. Physical ones, between cells, built and taken down and rebuilt every day of your life. Everything you know is held in a pattern of them.
Building them takes work and it takes materials, and after fifty the building slows down. Not the cells. The connections.
`[SUBSTANTIATION NEEDED: sourced figure or study reference for the age-related decline in the building and maintenance of synaptic connections]`
And when the building slows, connections that are not being used hard get taken down faster than they get put back.
The information is still there. The way to it is what goes.
That is why it is names. And why it is the reason you walked into a room. And why it is a collection time you have known for four years.
Then she said the thing that made me put my folder down on her counter.
“That ginkgo you were on. What does it do?”
I said it was for circulation.
“It is. It is for blood flow. Marian, there was never anything wrong with the blood getting there.”
Eight months. Twenty two euro a month. For a supply problem I did not have.
And then she said one more thing.
She said the building never stops. It slows, but it does not stop, and a brain at sixty will lay down new connections if it is given the materials to do it with.
And I stood in a solicitor’s office on a Tuesday and I laughed at her.
Because I have watched it four hundred times.
A child comes in to you at eleven months with nothing. No words, none at all. And eighteen months later she is standing at a sand tray telling another child what she is not allowed to do.
The whole of language, built out of nothing, in eighteen months.
I stood in a room and watched that happen four hundred times and I have the photographs of it.
And not once, not one single time, did it cross my mind that mine could still be doing it.
What is actually in it
I went through it before I ordered it, and I was going through it hoping to find rubbish, so that I would be entitled to dismiss the whole thing and go back to being resigned, which at least does not hurt.
That is not what I found.
Lion’s Mane, 300 mg.
A mushroom, and I nearly stopped reading there, because I have had my fill of mushrooms in health food shops. Then I read what it is studied for, which is the body’s own signalling for growing and maintaining nerve tissue.
Not blood flow. The building itself.
Citicoline, 500 mg.
This is the one that made me sit down. It is a raw material. The brain uses it for the membranes of its own cells, and for making the messenger that carries a signal across the join between one cell and the next.
Kitty had just spent ten minutes telling me my trouble was the joins. And here was the stuff the joins are made out of, printed on a label, in milligrams.
Saffron, 30 mg.
For mood and for attention. I would have skipped over that a year ago as the soft one. I would not now. You cannot hold on to a thing you were never properly present for, and I had spent two years so wound up about forgetting things that I was barely there for half of them.
Three of them, doing three jobs.
They build. The Lion’s Mane works on the growing and the maintaining.
They connect. The Citicoline is the material the joins are made of.
They steady. The Saffron settles you enough to take the thing in in the first place.
Build. Connect. Steady.
And that is where the thousand and six euro finally explained itself to me.
The ginkgo was blood flow. There was nothing wrong with my blood flow.
The fish oil was general. Good for you, I have no doubt. Aimed at nothing in particular.
The app was practice. You can practise all you like. It does not hand the brain one scrap of material to build with, and I have the certificates on a phone to prove it.
The laminated sheet was a plan.
And the multivitamin was a multivitamin, and I paid for seven months of it.
Not one of the five went near the actual job.
And I am the woman who watched four hundred brains build themselves out of nothing, and I spent a thousand euro on circulation.
The rest of what I looked at is duller but it mattered to me. It is made in the EU to EU standards. Two capsules with breakfast, so it is not another thing at another time of day to be remembered, which in my position was not a small point. And the doses are printed on the label rather than hidden behind the words proprietary blend.
I ordered it that night at the kitchen table. That was the first week of December.
What actually happened
Nothing happened for the first few days and I want that said plainly.
One thing did happen and it is not a result. It goes down with a cup of tea, there is no taste and no smell, and I did not have to build a routine around it. After the laminated sheet, that mattered.
The second week something turned up that I was not looking for at all.
I finished a book.
I had one beside the bed since Easter that I had started three times. I got to the end of it just before Christmas and lay there working out when the last time was, and it was 2023.
The fourth week was the first real difference and it was not dramatic.
I did the shop without the list.
I write a list and I leave it on the counter on purpose, and that has been my measure for two years. Fourteen things on it. I came home with thirteen, and the one I missed was tinfoil.
Not gone. But undeniably better than the seven or eight I had got used to.
I will say something here so there is no confusion about it.
I am not going to tell you my memory is what it was at thirty. It is not, and anyone telling you different is selling you something.
By February it was not a symptom at all. It was something I had stopped doing.
I stopped writing things on three surfaces. It went to two, and then to the calendar, and I noticed it about a fortnight after it had happened.
And in March Aoife was here on a Sunday and I was telling her about a family that went through Sunnyside between 2004 and 2011, names and years and the whole of it, and she stopped stacking the dishwasher and asked me had I got my bloods done.
I said I had not.
A few honest things
I am going to tell you what nobody told me, because I spent a thousand euro on promises.
This is not a miracle and it does not work on internet time.
The first bit, being clearer in myself, came within a couple of weeks. The real bit, the names and the lists, took about four weeks. The whole of it, which is that I am no longer managing myself all day long, came around the third month.
That is normal. A brain does not rebuild in a fortnight. Anybody promising you faster is selling you something.
So what I would do is get enough for two or three months at once. One jar will show you it is doing something. Two or three will show you what actually changes.
Bioprime give thirty days, so that risk is neither mine nor yours.
The real risk is the other one. It is buying one jar, feeling the first bit of it, and stopping just short of the part you bought it for.
It is not just me
I have turned into one of those women who brings it up when nobody asked. I know. I am aware of myself.
But since I started talking about it, things have come back to me. Here are three that stayed.
“I gave up the readings at Mass in 2022 because I lost my place twice and I was not going to have it happen a third time. I had done the readings in that church for nineteen years. I went back on the rota in February. I am not going to tell you I am a young one, I am sixty seven and I bring the sheet up with me. But I have not lost my place.”
Nancy, 67, Co. Longford
“I teach biology, so I went at the label rather than the story. Two of the three are things you can go and read about, and citicoline in particular is not a herbal, it is a compound the brain genuinely uses for cell membranes and for acetylcholine. It also tells you how much of each in milligrams, which most of that shelf will not. I started taking it in January and I have not stopped.”
Yvonne, 52, Co. Kildare
“I was sure it was rubbish. I had money spent on the big names, the ones sitting at eye level. A European crowd I had never heard of was going nowhere with me. Two months in, my husband asked me what had me so chatty at the dinner. THAT is what he noticed. Not my memory. That I was joining in.”
Anita, 58, Co. Wexford
Where you get it and who makes it
MemoryPRO is not in the chemists. It is not in the health food shops, it is not in the big chains, it is not on Amazon and it is not on the discount sites.
It is sold off the Bioprime Science site and nowhere else.
When I ordered it I knew nothing about them but the name. Once it worked I got curious and looked them up.
A small European outfit. They make it to EU standards and they have `[CUSTOMER COUNT]` customers, with no television advertising and not one shop anywhere.
Which means the whole of it came from women telling other women, which, when I think about it, is exactly how I heard, off a jar sitting beside a stapler.
They ship from inside the EU, so there is no customs charge the way there is with half of what you order in from across the water.
And then the price caught me on the hop.
After a hundred and seventy six euro on ginkgo for a circulation problem I did not have. After two hundred and ten on fish oil. After a hundred and eighty two on an app I got very good at. After two hundred and thirty five for an hour in Dublin and a laminated sheet. After two hundred and three for four months of a multivitamin I did not want.
A thousand and six euro.
A jar is €39
Thirty nine euro. For a month.
I read it twice because I was sure I was looking at a trial size.
Two jars are €59 and three are €75, which means the third one adds sixteen euro. And since I have just told you honestly that the real change came around the third month, that is the sum that matters.
Delivery is `[FREE SHIPPING THRESHOLD]` and it usually comes inside `[DELIVERY WINDOW]` working days.
One thing I will say, because it caught me out the second time. It goes out of stock.
Not in the fake way with only 3 left and a number flashing at the side of the screen. Actually out of stock, because they make it in small batches and they do not sit on a warehouse full of it.
The first time mine came in three days. The second time I waited nine, and I was poor enough company in this house for those nine days.
So if you are looking at it in stock now, I would not leave it.
30 day guarantee · ships from within the EU
What it does, in short
It builds. Lion’s Mane 300 mg, working on the body’s own signalling for growing and maintaining nerve tissue. The part aimed at the building rather than the supply.
It connects. Citicoline 500 mg, the raw material the brain uses for its own cell membranes and for the messenger that carries a signal across the join.
It steadies. Saffron 30 mg, for mood and attention, because you cannot hold on to a thing you were never properly present for.
It asks nothing of you. Two capsules with your breakfast. No new routine at a new time of day, which in my position was not a small consideration.
What actually changed
I would love to tell you my memory came back and leave it at that.
That is not it.
What changed is that I am not managing myself all day long. The checking, the three surfaces, the four looks at the calendar. That is where the hours of my day were going and I did not know it.
What changed is that I read books again.
And in April, Aoife rang on a Wednesday evening about half seven, the same as the last time.
She said the creche was grand but Meabh was in bits every Monday, and would I take the two of them Tuesdays and Thursdays again from after Easter.
She did not say why it had changed. I did not ask her.
I said that would be lovely.
I think about what would have happened if Kitty had shut that handbag.
And I will be straight with you, I nearly did not order it. I sat at that table and I nearly put the phone down, because I had hoped so many times and it had come to nothing so many times that hope was starting to look like something I could not afford.
I think there are a great many women sitting exactly there. You stop trying, because trying and failing again is worse than not trying at all.
I did not put the phone down.
I am at that gate at half one now, for a twenty to two collection, and it is not because I am afraid of being late.
It is because I like being early, and I had forgotten that about myself as well.
If you recognised yourself anywhere in this, I think you ought to try it.
If you write the same thing down in three places and then check all three.
If you have stopped reading books and told nobody.
If somebody has quietly stopped asking you to do a thing you always did.
If you have caught yourself saying “sure, sixty is sixty.”
Sixty is not sixty. Something stopped being built and nobody told you.
Try it properly, not one jar and a shrug. Two or three, and enough time for it to do the work.
The link below goes to the Bioprime Science site. If it is in stock, do not be overthinking it. If it is not, leave your email for the notification, because it goes quickly when it comes back.
I nearly did not bother.
Bioprime Science · 30 day guarantee · Ships from within the EU
Food supplement. Not a substitute for a varied and balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle. Do not exceed the recommended daily dose. Keep out of the sight and reach of young children. Individual experiences vary.