I want to remember.

As a writer people are constantly praising me for the amazing job I must be doing writing things down.

It’s going to be so amazing for you when your son is grown and you’ve written down all of these memories.

Umm… errr… yeah. It’s going to be the tits when he gets ahold of my online presence around adolescence and realizes his mom is a hot mess who doesn’t have even the very slightest of clues how to raise a human and has spent the majority of her social currency screaming into the unknown about how hard it is. I AM SO LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT!

But more to the point, I’m not writing anything down. Like many parents, as the years have gone by I have lived in that absurd loop of believing that I’ll remember every adorable, precious, and life altering thing, while simultaneously not remembering anything that happened beyond 30 minutes ago. It’s not for lack of desire, or even effort for that matter. (RIP to the dozens of purchased, opened, and then forgotten journals.) I’ve thought about texting myself things to remember. Trying to write a sentence every night about one thing to carry forward. Scrap books. Apps. I’ve thought about a lot of it. I’ve done none. Six years has passed me by and I don’t have a catalog of words, quirky phrases, or even the classic firsts. Between you and me, I don’t even remember what his first word was. Even more between us, the only reason I remember the time he was born was because my husband (who is clearly an absolute genius) put it in the calendar reminder for our son’s birthday. So every year…