Lately, I have been more aware of how much I’m forgetting. I think it’s a mom’s prerogative to forget things; we are running other lives besides our own, so we have a right to forget a few things. But sometimes we get into situations where there are more things to forget than normal.

I have called the last 45 days my 45 days of Lent. Lent is the days from Ash Wednesday leading up to Easter. In order to honor these days and the culmination of Easter many people choose to give up something, pray more, or make some sort of other sacrifice. I had so many things going on during Lent, I decided for me it was the ultimate sacrifice to make it through without forgetting anything.

In the last 45 days I’ve refinanced the house; fought with our homeowner’s insurance company; had a Japanese exchange student for two weeks; assisted in making two complicated costumes for the anime convention my children are attending; coordinate the Youth Living Stations of the Cross; set up two presentations for the Youth Living Stations of the cross; chaperone my children, plus two or maybe three extra children at the anime convention iin Seattle and bring them home alive; and plan Easter Sunday for ten people. So not forgetting things has been a challenge these last 45 days.

As I was making a list of all the food I wanted to buy to bring to the anime convention so I was prepared for the kids’ drive-by eatings, I realized I also had to shop for Easter Sunday. I laughed to myself about how funny it would be if my in-laws showed up at my house and I had forgotten about buying food for dinner. I’d be pulling out random things from the freezer to throw something together. So I added Easter Sunday dinner items on my grocery list.

But as I found out while shopping at Costco on Thursday, there are many things that did not make it on the list. Part of the problem is I have a constant script running through my head of everything that needs to get done and it often derails my train of thought. After I had left the produce section I remembered I needed potatoes. So I headed back to get potatoes. On the way the script started running through my head and I forgot what I went back for. I wandered around the general area trying to remember and finally gave up and continued shopping, hoping it would come to me again.

There was some weird sequence of events that triggered the reminder of potatoes in the first place; like I picked up frozen beans and thought about roasting beans and then remembered I needed potatoes. Although I couldn’t remember what the sequence was so I could only hope that I would pick up things in the same order to trigger the memory again. I went through most of the store before I did something that suddenly reminded me I had gone after potatoes. When I got to the potatoes I was so overwhelmed by my choices I ended up buying every kind.

Then on Friday morning, I was going over the script, getting one kid off to school, getting the other one ready to go to the convention early with another parent, and the Stations of the Cross event for that evening totally dropped off my radar for about 30 minutes. It really freaked me out, because if I thought forgetting Sunday dinner for 10 people would be a horrible faux pax, forgetting an event that involved twenty children and two hundred audience members would probably qualify me for insanity.

But I made it out of the store with the potatoes, I remembered to show up for the Stations of the Cross, and I’m sitting here in the hotel next to the anime convention and so far I haven’t lost any children. I don’t think…

Now, what am I forgetting?

Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Covington. She is committed to writing about the humor amidst the chaos of a family. You can read more of her writing and her daily blog on her website livingwithgleigh.com.