THE BEST THING I'VE EVER REMEMBERED

If I don't write it down, I won't remember.

As I heard myself saying those words to someone the other day, the words rang truer than I would have liked. When I said them, I was referring to a small matter, something I quickly typed onto my ever-changing to-do list on the “notes” section of my phone.

Honestly, I can't even remember what it was I was writing down to remember. The hastily typed note has long since been erased, and my memory fails in my effort to recall what I was trying to remember.

It's not the only thing I can't remember. Entire days of my life are gone. My mind has no recollection of them other than one big blur of time. That may sound dramatic, as though I'm exaggerating my memory. I wish it was an exaggeration.

Lately, I've been doing memory exercises. The brain is a complex organ and can be retrained, reshaped and molded.

So I'm hoping these mental exercises will increase my ever-failing memory. But most of the time, I forget to do my self-made brain workout. So there goes that.

It's funny, sometimes. And not funny, all at the same time.

My teens use it to their advantage; “borrowing” money and saying they'll pay me back and hoping I'll forget. My husband has suffered repeatedly due to my memory lapses, with the most recent escapade being me going to the grocery store and forgetting the one item he wanted me to purchase. (I wish I could say that it's the first time it happened, but it's not.)

As much as I try to fight it, time is somehow getting the best of my memory. Every day brings on piles of new information, and the old information fades away from my memory without me ever knowing it left. I'm constantly making vows to take more pictures, capture more moments on video, and write in the journal that is still mostly blank.

Because I really do want to remember things. I want to remember the good moments of laughter, the little moments that are adding up to be called “the life I've lived.”

I understand the importance of storytelling. It's almost a lost art amongst today's tech-savvy world of digital memories and electronic files. I've tried to tell more stories to my kids. They ask details about their early years, and I tell them story after story of the way they used to crawl, how much they cried, or their younger nuances of speech.