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David Spates What happened to my memory? I don't know I was prepared for SOME aspects of child care
-- the reduced sleep, no more reading the Sunday paper in bed,
and dirty diapers so vile they could, conceivably, end your sense
of smell forever. I read a lot about being a new parent, and
I had a seemingly endless parade of folks advising me of what
to do and what not to do. Between reading what the "experts"
were writing and listening to anecdotal advice from other parents,
I was ready. Well, I was ready as anyone can be. They left out a biggie, though. Nobody told
me I was going to suffer recurring amnesia. You'd think someone
would've mentioned that. I've been in this parenting boat for a mere
nine months, but I discovered early on that babies give their
parents amnesia. It's an unfortunate side effect, one that I'm
happy to shoulder in the drive to perpetuate and better the species.
Some days are worse than others, but the mental cloud seems to
always exist. Like the weather, some days are partly sunny and
some days are partly cloudy. Then there are the days when you
can't see the sun at all -- like the kind of day when I drove
away with my checkbook on the trunk. That's the type of mistake I very, very rarely
made in my pre-baby life. Maybe every once in a while I'd forget
to roll the trash to the curb on Thursday, or I'd neglect to
mail the bills I stashed in my jacket's inside pocket, but moments
of brainus interuptus like those just didn't happen all that
often. They happen much more frequently now. I was preparing to leave the house, with Anna
in tow, and as any parent knows there are approximately 217 little
tasks you must do before going anywhere with a baby. The days
of quick jaunts to the Kwik-E Mart for a gallon of milk and a
bag of Funyuns are over. Now when we want to leave the house,
it takes an effort of monumental planning and coordination the
likes of which are rarely seen in the civilian sector. There's
a diaper bag to stock, facial squash residue to extract, a diaper
to change, a shirt to spot-clean, teeny socks to find, wee little
shoes to slip over wee little feet, and a UL-listed car seat
from which you must collect the previous day's teething cracker
crumbs. And those are just the highlights. I won't bore you with
the complete list of minutiae, and you thought that was
the minutiae. With, finally, a place for everything and
everything in its place, we made our way to the outside world.
Since that particular trip included the anticipated writing of
personal checks, I grabbed my checkbook en route to the garage.
Reaching the garage and the auto tucked within, I set down the
car seat and the baby tucked within so that I may open the backseat
door, all the while still clinging to my checkbook which, little
did I know, was about to spend a relaxing day at the intersection
of Concord and Loop roads. It's at this point that I placed my checkbook
on the trunk, freeing my two hands so I could snap the car seat
onto its base. Lock and load. Baby's in, I'm in, the engine is
running, and away we went. It took only about a mile for the baby-induced
amnesia to subside, but that's a mile too late. A sizable portion
of the remainder of my afternoon was spent tracing and retracing
my route from home to the point where I realized the checkbook
was gone. It's a fun way to kill a couple of hours. It seems parenting not only inhibits memory,
it also makes you blind. Even as I drove and redrove the route
a half dozen times or so, I couldn't locate the checkbook. Conceding "uncle," I headed home.
Two days later, a man called me and said he found my checkbook
and that if I wanted to get it, I could drive over to his mother's
house where he left it. When I got there, the nice guy's mom
asked me how I lost it. Even though I gave her the abbreviated
version, she nodded knowingly and smiled. She probably lost a
checkbook or two when she was a new parent. She seemed normal
now, though. It's nice to know that I'll probably regain some
memory. All of this reminds me of a Bill Cosby bit.
He said all children are brain-damaged. He based this assertion
on the fact that if you ask a child, any child, a question, the
odds are pretty good that you'll get the response, "I don't
know." "Who ate the last cookie and put the
bag back in the cupboard?" "I don't know." "Why are your jeans covered in plaster? "I don't know." "Are you hungry?" "I don't know." "How could you possibly have failed gym?" "I don't know." "Why did you shoot a bottle rocket at
your friend?" "I don't know." I'm not sure if the problem lies in the child's
brain or the parent's, but it seems that something somewhere
is misfiring. I can't remember where I left my glasses, so I
search the house for 45 minutes, only to find them in the pocket
of the shirt I'm wearing during the search. All the while Anna's
sobbing into her bib, no doubt coming to terms that we're somehow
related. "Didn't you realize your glasses were
right there?" her look asks. "I don't know." · · · |