Generally speaking, I adore that my six-year-old daughter, Sasha, and I have a lot in common. We share a love for heaping plates of pasta, making people pee in their pants laughing, and wearing something pink and sparkly whenever possible.
Yesterday, though, I noticed something that freaked me out: We both have a complete inability to finish a task without getting so distracted that we forget what we set out to do in the first place.
Sasha told me her library book was due, so I suggested she take it from its special library book spot and put it in her backpack so she wouldn’t forget it. She retrieved the book, but then became so enthralled with a lone googly eye that had fallen off a crafts project and onto the rug that she dropped the book and set off to locate the half-blind creature to which it belonged. She then determined to repair him, which involved finding the glue, which she couldn’t open and so naturally resorted to using her teeth. You can see where this is going—it was all very upsetting, non-toxic though the glue was.
The upshot: The book never made it into the backpack and we now have no idea where it is.
The scary part is that if you swapped in a few adult details (I’m looking for my house keys, and not a pipe cleaner and feather snake-bird) that could easily have been me.
Except I’m 42, not six, and I don’t lose track of my goals because the world is such a curious and wondrous place that I feel I must walk through every door that opens before me.
No, I do it because I’m so damned tired and stressed half the time that if the phone rings while I’m in mid-thought—even if that thought was an overnight solution to the sub-prime mortgage crisis--it is gone, blown to bits, impossible to piece together again.
It’s no secret that stress does a number on your brain that can lead to forgetfulness; some research shows that the estrogen loss that comes with age might have that effect, as can depression. At the very least, I can finger the first one as my culprit.
