As I find myself endlessly searching through my house, I realize, yes, it’s true; I’m becoming my mother. I’ve laughed at her through the years because she’s always losing things; I even joked that she would lose her head if it wasn’t attached … and now my words have come back to bite me.
But I haven’t decided if I’m truly getting more forgetful in my old age, or if I just have more things to keep track of than ever before?
When you are a kid, you don’t fully comprehend how much your parents have on their plates.
Now I have a system in place to put my phone, car keys, wallet, glasses, etc., exactly in the same spot — that way I always know where to find them. And this works really well … when I actually do it. Now if I could just keep this up with everything else in my life.
Unfortunately, I get in these modes where I decide to reorganize things — you know to make everything easier to find. The only problem is I have a tendency to forget my new and ultra convenient spots I move everything to. And the trouble begins.
The best thing about looking for lost items is that sometimes you find other lost things that you had given up hope for, or even forgotten you had.
Then I have the times I lose things that were never really lost in the first place. Like the time I was looking for my cell phone, but it was nowhere to be found. So I decided to call myself on the house phone, and I wandered through several rooms, calling myself multiple times, before I realized the sound was following me. What was happening? Oh, I had tucked my cell neatly in my back pocket. (To have on hand for convenience, of course.)
It doesn’t help that my kids are always losing things as well. And they are even worse at finding them. (Or at least they pretend to be so I will hunt down their lost toys, shoes or blankies for them.)
When the boys actually do help to find something lost, it usually doesn’t turn out to be very useful, because then they just fight over who should get the newly-found-item. “But that is mine,” says one. “I found it first,” replies the other. Finders keepers, losers weepers.
Here lately my youngest son has been afraid to be alone, so he has taken to being my shadow. Which is sometimes helpful if he sees me put something away, and I forget where I put it. But if I leave a room, and he doesn’t know where I am going, he becomes immediately concerned. Now when I am putting away laundry, or cleaning on multiple floors, it can be somewhat funny and a bit annoying when he screams and cries like I purposefully abandoned him.
So I finally asked him, “Why do you follow me around? You know I won’t leave you.”
He looked up at me and said, “So I don’t lose you.”
I guess, he’s learned at an early age to keep the things you don’t want to lose in life close, and those you can’t live without, even closer.
But he will never lose me. For no matter where I am, he will always have my heart.
In life, there are a lot of things you will lose, some things you will break, and probably even more things you would love to have.
But the most important things in your life are the people you surround yourself with, for they are irreplaceable. Tell them you love them — and don’t want to lose them — every chance you get.
