I Can't Remember

I tried to slip one of my children’s teachers a twenty dollar bill the other day, but she wouldn’t take it. I think she just felt weird taking unexpected cash money from me, though my guess is if I had handed her a $20 gift card to an office supply store she’d have taken it. I get requests all the time asking for paper towels and tissues and hand sanitizer and plastic spoons and red food coloring and pipe cleaners and bottles of glue and sugar cubes. Only rarely do I manage to actually get these things to the school, and I feel terribly about my failure, because I know if the parents don’t come through the teachers have to reach into their own pockets, or the parents who are more coordinated than I am end up taking the lion’s share of the burden.

There is so much remembering and coordinating involved. I have to note what I’m supposed to get, buy it, give it to my daughter, and make sure she gets it to school, assuming it isn’t something too unwieldy or messy for her to bring on her own. That’s like four remembers for one simple task. I’m lucky to get one remember in before I forget.

As I write this, it is the third day of the third quarter of school. My son, who is in seventh grade, and so you’d think he’d be too old for this sort of thing, has already had requests for gummy bears, red Twizzlers™, toothpicks, and Play Doh, in addition to the standard compliment of paper towels and tissues. I wrote these things on a scrap of paper as I left work the other day, knowing I was running by the grocery store to pick up a few things anyway. I made up a New Year’s resolution on the spot. This year, 2015, I was going to be the kind of Mom that came through for the teachers; the kind of Mom who made sure her kids had what they needed to make edible strands of DNA and learn geometry through clay.

I remembered to buy exactly none of these things. I didn’t even remember that I was supposed to buy them until the next day when I put my hand in my coat pocket and found the list I’d so carefully written.

Usually I’m a pretty responsible person. I show up where I’m supposed to show up when I’m supposed to show up there. I get my paperwork in on time. I get holiday cards out before the actual holiday and pay all my bills in a timely fashion. I’ve never run out of gas in my car. There are always clean clothes in my closet, and in my children’s closet. Although there may not be any food I *want* to eat in my house, there is generally food I *can* eat in my house, and some of it even has nutritional value.

So why can’t I remember these things? Isn’t my children’s education a priority? Thinking back, I can’t recall my teachers ever asking my parents for things like this. I don’t ever remember schlepping shopping bags full of supplies on the school bus. Of course, I can’t remember any hands-on type projects beyond fourth grade, either. Maybe this is the price we pay for more creative teaching methods. I guess it is just hard for my brain to latch on to the fact that a 79 cent box of toothpicks is related to my son’s education in any significant way.

Of course, it’s not like I’m the kind of person who remembers these kinds of things in any context. When I’m supposed to bring something from home into work, my friends will leave Post-It™ notes on the dash board of my car and text me at least twice during the night and once in the morning.

I am proud to say that I have never missed a Court date in 20 years of being a practicing attorney, although about a half dozen times I have driven to the wrong courthouse.

So what’s the difference? Why am I completely reliable in one context, and completely unreliable in another?

I think I knew once, but I forgot.

Lori B. Duff is the author of the Amazon ‘Hot New Release’ Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza, a collection of autobiographical humor essays. The hard copy of the book can be found on Amazon & barnesandnoble.com. The e-book can be found here. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/loribduffauthor. For more blogs written by Lori, click here. For more information about Lori in general, click here. If you want Lori to do your writing for you, click here.