Total Recall

I am one swift blow to the head from being the guy in the movie Memento.

I have a terrible memory. Seriously, my capacity for details surprisingly shallow. Each day that I wake up and remember my name and where I live is a small victory. I’m good with faces, but not names, which means that I probably give people a lot of awkward blank stares during social events. I don’t know what my friends do for a living or how old my parents are. I’ve long since forgotten the stats of my kids when they were first born.

It could be argued that my diminished capacity for details stems from one too many abuses of my brain during extra-curricular activities in college. But I’m comforted by the fact that my memory was terrible long before those debaucherous days. Though I’m sure they didn’t help.

Don’t get me wrong, my brain works. I know this cause I can remember useless things like what theater, with whom and where I was sitting for just about every movie I’ve seen on the big screen. I can conjure up hundreds of Simpsons quotes and I can remember song lyrics from the 80s. But I will forget to run the dishwasher, even though I was asked to do it a mere hour earlier.

WonderWife™ is quickly losing patience with me. Not that I can blame her. Many of our conversations go like this:

DGB: So what are we doing this weekend?

WW™: You’re taking the Bean to a birthday party because I have an appointment with Sprout.

DGB: Really? Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?

WW™: I did. We had a whole conversation about it. Last week. Over breakfast. You were eating eggs. I had a whole wheat bagel with cream cheese. You were wearing your red striped shirt. It was overcast and 67 degrees.

DGB: Nope. No memory of that. Are you sure it happened?

It’s not that I don’t care about these things. It’s just that the more mundane details of life tend to run through my brain like water through a colander. As a parent, there is so much more that I need to remember. These two extra small people living with us come with and endless amount of facts, trivia, statistics and rules. Not to mention the host of new people in our lives as a result. WW™ has excelled at cultivating different mommy communities—both on line and in real life. So now when she tells me that she’s going out with Lisa, I need to remember she is, what kid she parents and her husband’s name and occupation. I'm useless at birthday parties where it's all blank stares and birthday cake.

I used to blissfully bounce through life, unaware of what I was forgetting. But now I'm reminded of what I don't know and can't remember on a daily basis. It's starting to be a drag on everyone, especially me. But what is there to do?

So I ask of you, Hot Dads readers… Um, what was I talking about?