My hard drive is out of Memory

I have commented to friends that I believe that I lost part of my ability to remember things when I gave birth to my children. I am sure that there is no medical explanation. It is more about having children giving birth. My oldest child is twelve and right after he was born, I began to notice that I could not remember what I needed to buy at the store or whether I packed everything, I needed in the diaper bag when heading out. Three and half years later when our family grew by two more feet, I realized this problem was getting worse.

Have you ever walked into a room and stood there dumb founded trying to remember why you came into this room in the first place? You think the way to avoid forgetting things is to keep a list but low and behold, you can’t remember where you put the list. Come on, admit it… it has happened to you. Those are some of the early signs that your brain is at times so over-loaded that it has to purge something. When I was young, single and childfree, my memory worked just fine. I even had the ability to forget selective things like what time my curfew was. Now, I can’t even remember those days.

As a child I used to giggle when my grandmother, who had eight children and twenty six grandchildren, would look right at me and scream out several other family member’s names and then finally give up and say, “You girl, come here when I call you!” Now I finally get it. I think my memory is failing with two kids, she had so much more to keep track of. The even funnier thing is that I have managed to look right at one of my children and call them by the other one’s name, I even through my husband in the mix sometimes.

My husband and children’s favorite sign that I am losing it is that I get frantic about whether I have locked the front door, closed the mudroom door and finally the garage door. To my knowledge, though I could be forgetting, I have never left any of those doors unlocked or open. This “obsession” only gets worse when we are leaving on vacation. With that I have a track record of forgetting a diaper bag and realizing I did not have it right before reaching the airport terminal. I read once that to try to remember something you should repeat it to yourself several times. My family flat out falls on the floor laughing when I pull out of the garage and repeat all the way up the driveway closed the door, closed the door.

I know that some memory loss is attributed to aging. I want to believe what I am suffering has more to do with my internal hard-drive having so many things to keep track of that it simply cannot keep up. Maybe one day they will invent brain RAM or I will be able to get some new sort of chip that speeds up my processing. For now, I struggle through and hope that the next time I tell a story I am not repeating it for the millionth time. So remember, wait I forgot what I wanted to tell you.