All too accurate, though this lucky lady looks like she’s nailed the clone thing

 

Mom Brain. Brain Fog. Or good old-fashioned forgetfulness. If this doesn’t sound familiar, don’t worry. It’s coming for you.

 

Like many of us over a certain age (let’s just say older than 25), my best friend has taken to using readers in order to read small print. She has several pairs stashed around the house, and often pushes her glasses on top of her head when she’s not using them.

 

You probably know where this is going.

 

She recently found herself scouring her house, looking for a pair of readers, and couldn’t locate a single pair. Her daughter, home from college, asked what was wrong, and when she said she couldn’t find her glasses, her daughter just pointed to the top of her head and laughed. She was wearing three pairs of glasses as defacto headbands. Not her best moment.

 

I smugly believed I had dodged this bullet, this undeniable sign of impending death aging (thanks to what? Good genes? Wheatgrass? Dormant superhero potential?) until one day I simply couldn’t read the dosing information on a bottle of children’s Advil. At least I think it was Advil. The print was annoyingly small. For all I know, I administered a healthy dose of evening primrose oil to my son one Wednesday morning.

 

Despite my firm belief that manufacturers decided to start printing everything in a smaller font just to mess with me, despite giving in and using the larger “mom-sized font” on my phone, despite my abject denial over the fact that I am somehow no longer 30, my eyes have betrayed me, and I am now reluctantly employing readers on a disturbingly frequent basis. When I can find them, that is.

 

Which brings me to my point: Brain Fog. What is happening to my brain? I can remember what outfit I wore to class in third grade the day Kathie Ritchie and I decided to wear wigs and lipstick to school in a sad attempt to fool everyone that we were not ourselves, but rather the new, cool, sassy girls on the scene. I can remember every single word to the 80s-era commercial for Pacific Power and Light warning us of the danger of power lines. But I cannot remember what it is I was supposed to not forget for today. Or maybe it was tomorrow.

 

So what can we do about it? The smarty-pants people over at Harvard Medical School have some ideas. Although they did not suggest taking a week-long spa trip with your BFF, which grieves me. Is this happening to you? At least with PlanHero I can stop papering my house with Post-It reminders, although I’m not certain that softens the blow. Oh well, I’ll forget about it soon enough.