I’m starting to get a little worried, back when nobody had smart phones I used to have a decent memory, I no longer do. Case in point, an old friend was visiting recently and we were talking about people we both knew and I mentioned a friend of both our dads who had passed away recently. She was shocked, I hadn’t told her about it. I’m pretty sure that when I found out I said I’d call her and her family to let them know, but I forgot. To add insult to injury, the Husband then said I hadn’t told him, so I started questioning the facts, had this person really passed away or had I just gotten mixed up? I distinctly remembered the phone conversation in which I found out, but what if we had been talking about someone else? What if I had just imagined it all? So I called the person who had originally told me and had to pose the silliest question I’ve ever asked someone: Hi, is so and so dead?
The answer was yes, and I was reminded of the circumstances and everything came back to me in HD color, but frankly I’m a little worried. I’m 36 years old, how on earth is my memory so foggy that I can’t remember beyond the shadow of a doubt being told that a friend of the family had recently passed away? How did I forget to inform my friend? Why didn’t I tell the husband? There is no earthly reason for my memory to be so bad.
How do I relate all of this to smartphones? Well, I used to have to memorize numbers, I knew all my friends’ and family’s numbers by heart, I knew all the numbers of businesses and restaurants I normally went to, I had, literally, hundreds of numbers in my head. I could remember my appointments weeks into the future with absolute precision. Nowadays I need my iphone to remind me of my weekly pilates class, I can’t even remember my own home number.
Is it the pregnancies and childbirth that sucked my brain dry? Impossible, I’ve only got two kids, if I had even one more at this rate I wouldn’t remember how to go pee. What is happening to my mind? Is my attention span worse than a two-year old’s or is it something more that I should be worrying about?
I probably need to start doing those brain power building Nintendo something or other games. If only I could remember to….
Toodles, M
The Bonny Bard 
I blame the smartphones. Thanks for giving me that out. Seriously.
Blaming things on technology always seems to work..
My mother is INFAMOUS for telling one of us (my sister and I) – twice -about an uncle or auntie who has died, and then thinking she told both of us.
Because she couldn’t remember who she told the first time.
I’m very, very afraid. On the other hand, as my grandmother always said “this forgetting thing is not so bad. I can reread all my favorite books because I can’t remember how they end!!!”