Where Is My Mind?

Weighing in at 10 lbs. exactly at 6 weeks old.

Today I took Ivy for her two-month well baby appointment—except her two-month well baby appointment isn't until next Wednesday. I had it written down wrong on the calendar. Now that I think about it, I do remember the doctor saying "10:00 AM on the 17th" when I called to confirm the appointment a few weeks ago. But it got tangled up in the Rube Goldberg machine of my mind, and I wrote down 10:00 AM on the 10th instead.

The mistake ended up being fine. Our naturopathic physician recently moved to an office half a mile from our house. We'd walked over, or really I'd walked over with Ivy strapped to my chest in the Ergo. It was cold and gray but not raining, so I took us home the long way around and made an official "walk" out of it. Ivy slept, and I went over my never-ending mental to-do list.

It's just a little unnerving, actually, that my calendar was wrong about Ivy's well baby exam. The calendar is my attempt at transforming my mental jumble into a neat paper grid of official Things To Be Done. The agenda in my head is a wild mess these days. It always was, but having two children makes the mess even messier.

(Agenda literally translates from Latin as "things to be done." I'm amused and reassured by idea of Ancient Roman To-Do lists.)

I need to be able to trust the calendar because I can't trust my mind. As much as I try to remember it all, to organize the appointments, to make sure Westley is ready for preschool on preschool days, to notice that Ivy is tired and needs to be soothed before the frantic squawking starts, to feed everyone, to feed myself, to take the library books back, to actually read the new library books before they're due, to get back to the people I promised to get back to, to write, to stretch, to rest...it gets away from me a little at a time, and then...

Shit, I'm supposed to have this ready by tomorrow! And there's no food in the house.

I actually have more time now that Westley is back in preschool, but it feels like I have less. It slips away from me faster. I have an hour and a half in which to do three hours' work. And it probably wouldn't take three hours, except that half of my mind is somewhere else. Maybe the reason Ivy seems so much more capable every day is that my intelligence is slowly dissolving into milk.

Even these words...I'm not sure what I'm writing about any more.

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