Bringing Up Mommy: No gadgets needed to keep up with kids
For all you overwhelmed, overtaxed and overwrought parents who aren’t lucky enough/rich enough/techy enough to own a Blackberry or some other really cool device that cattle-prods you every five minutes to tell you where you’re supposed to be now, I would like to suggest an alternative.
Your hand. Wherever I am, if somebody has to tell me something important and I don’t have a piece of paper — and sometimes even if I do — I write it on my own personal “palm” pilot.
If it goes on my hand, it means it’s high on the list of things to do.
It also means it has been forgotten at least once.
Right now, for example, there are two memos on my hand: “E $10” and “B 2: 45 Oct 2.”
The first, involving my 16-year-old daughter whose name begins with the letter “E,” is because I forgot to bring money to the outdoor festival where a) she was singing with her high school choir and b) they were selling the yummiest kettle corn in the Midwest.
Then, after I shamelessly said in the middle of a group of teenagers, “I wish I had $5 for kettle corn” and one of the boys, who I didn’t even know, pulled out a $10 bill, after which I said about 100 times I would pay him back the next day, I forgot. Bring on my hand.
The second memo involves my 11- year-old son whose name begins with “B.” (See how it works?) This note likewise got relegated to my hand — to be later transferred to a calendar — because of a forgotten event, as in I completely vegged his last dentist appointment. The dentist’s secretary even called me the day before the appointment to remind me. And still I forgot.
Forgetfulness is part of the human condition. This is especially true if you are a parent alive in the Age of Anxiety and six soccer games a week, especially if you’ve been at it for a while. Then, as if 10 years of diaper detail isn’t enough of a brain drain, along comes aging.
I am no longer the first chicken out of the barn, let me just say, nor the first parent to remember to bring hot dogs to contribute to the soccer concession stand — that is, if I remember the soccer game, and I have forgotten a few.
But not any more, not now that I have my hand! Whither I go, so does my hand, and why didn’t I think of this a long time ago? Probably because of the downside, to include the superintendent of schools no longer taking me seriously at school board meetings because he’s too busy trying to read my hand.
There’s also the small matter of important info getting washed off in the shower, which is why I recently bought a permanent marker that clips onto my key chain, which raises another question, this one about toxicity.
I heard about a young girl the other day whose doctor wouldn’t give her an epidural to have her baby because of her “tramp stamp,” otherwise known as a tattoo on the lower back, where the epidural needle goes. The doctor worried that the ink might enter her system along with the numbing drug.
Just remember when this becomes a trend in your hip parenting circles, when Target starts marketing Hand-Marker Sets in Rainbow Colors: You heard it here first. Write it on your hand so you don’t forget.
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