I'm Not Crazy....Really!

I don't consider myself old and I certainly don't think I'm crazy although my kids would beg to differ. I do think that when you become a parent, you gain so much. All of a sudden you are more responsible, (well some parents anyway) you gain more patience, more weight, but you also lose a certain amount of brain cells. This I know because you become more forgetful about things and something just happens to moms.

When I say forgetful, let me clarify that this is what my kids want me to think. For instance, before children, my mind was as sharp as a tack. I could recall places, times, and even the smallest details about things that happened years before. All of a sudden, I become a parent to teenagers and I apparently can't remember what I said just hours before. It seems that we have these conversations about things and then a couple hours later or even days later, when I question my kids, they say "Mom, we talked about that already!" or "Mom, you said I could do this or that!" I tell my kids I never said that and they tell me I said it in the car or while I was rushing out the door, or on the phone with someone etc. Now I know what I say most of the time even when I'm saying things that don't make sense (and I'll get to that in a moment) but they insist that I gave them permission to do something or go somewhere. I think that teenagers are very smart and the pick the right time for them to ask which happens to be the wrong time for parents. They know that we are not fully in attention mode so if they sneak a conversation in, we'll simply agree just to show we're hearing them without fully listening. I've told my kids I'm gonna start recording our conversations so I can play it back for them. I don't know why that would make them mad.

Now to my other topic...Saying things that don't make sense. I do this all the time. I know the minute the words come out of my mouth they're wrong but they just come out that way. For instance, I'll tell my kids to put the dishes in the dryer instead of dishwasher or I'll tell them to put the milk back in the restroom instead of refrigerator. I notice that I do that a lot with words that have the same sounding beginning or start with the same letter.

Sometimes I'm thinking of something else while I'm talking and a word will come out about what I'm thinking which has nothing to do with the conversation. For instance, I will think about needing to go grocery shopping while getting ready to take the kids to school and I'll tell them to get their list instead of their backpack. My kids look at me like I'm a crazy lady but I'm really not. I think moms and some dads have so many things that we have to juggle that our mind is always on things that need to be done instead of the present moment.

My kids and my husband laugh when we go somewhere and I say something out of left field. Like the day we were coming home from camping and I saw a guy riding a really nice bike. I made the comment that was a nice "hot dog" instead of "Harley."