How well do your children know you? If they sifted through a stack of biographies with the names blacked out, could they find the one that belonged to you?
I could have sworn my kids knew me inside out. After all, I’ve devoted my whole life to the little monsters. Surely they would be able to answer such basic questions as “Where was I born? How old am I?” and “When is my birthday?”
But the truth is its own horror story. There are strangers on the Internet who probably know more about me than my children. I discovered this while schlepping my kids to a school concert after a rushed mac-and-cheese dinner.
It was a dark and stormy night. A football in the back of our SUV thumped against the hatch like a decapitated head, especially on the hills of Lynnwood. My son and daughter were engaged in a battle of memories, trying to prove who could remember more. “What did we eat for dinner last night? What did we do the previous weekend?” The score was a cruel tie and it was up to me to issue the final question.
“What is my middle name?” I asked over the frenetic sound of windshield wipers.
The backseat became as silent as a morgue. Finally my daughter admitted that she and her brother had no idea.
Slayed, I moved on to something I thought would be easier. “What was the name of my first dog?” Surely they would remember my heart-wrenching story of Powder-Puff decimated by a coyote.
Nope.
I tried another question. “What was my first job?”
“Scooping elephant poop!” my son hollered.
I decided to give him partial credit for that one, because my first paying job was being a fifth-grade teaching assistant at the San Diego Zoo, where one day every week the campers got dirty with dung.
I began firing off basic questions from my resume, things I didn’t expect them to know but I thought they should probably discover. “What was my major in college? Where did I go to graduate school? How many years was I a teacher?”
I was met with total ignorance, which made me want to scream. It also helped me understand why my kids sometimes treat me like their servant. I am, after all, the woman who cooks their food, does their laundry, cleans their toilet and chauffeurs them to delightful school performances on Wednesday nights when she could be out to dinner with friends.
Maybe the rest of it, what I could be doing, isn’t as important as what I am doing right now, being there for them when they need me. Still, I don’t want to be their mommy-zombie, the walking body that cares for their needs and drives them around to stuff, but has no backstory of her own.
At the very least, gosh darn it, from now on they better remember my birthday. If not, I will haunt them forever.
Jennifer Bardsley lives in Edmonds. Her book “Genesis Girl” comes out September 27, 2016. Find her online on Instagram @the_ya_gal, Twitter @jennbardsley or at teachingmybabytoread.com.
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