Brain in need of reboot

Liz Ross Martyn - 17 Feb 16

My brain has neither enough space nor sufficient individual compartments for the current pace of parenting. My memory has about 533kb spare; I can identify this clearly as that is the point where my phone refuses to cope with any more functional data requests and tells me it is ‘critically low on storage’, and I have to ‘manage storage’, which I do by backing up photos and deleting the latest round of offspring selfies and apps downloaded to battle boredom at points where things like car services and haircuts have exceeded duration expectations.

I haven’t yet found an app for automatically managing my mobile storage issues; and it seems that for managing the storage settings in my brain, well there isn’t an app for that either.

So the circuitry is starting to fizzle at the edges. Often I am trying to say something while speed-thinking something else, which goes horribly wrong in all processes; words are incorrectly substituted and children stare at me blankly, saying ‘Chicory?’ in a quizzical manner, leading me to realise that I have combined teeth-cleaning instructions with an attempt to recall the name of the leafy veg from earlier, which has ended badly for all concerned. Or I can picture the word clearly written in my head, but it will not translate to making the exit via the medium of speech. 

I do try and concentrate on one thing at a time, but I have a feeling that mono-focus starts and ends with the world of work.

To be fair, I think the main problem is to do with the number of queries and reminders parenting seems to require on an hourly basis. It definitely isn’t helped by my children’s insistence that I need to have two entirely separate conversations with each of them simultaneously. Sometimes I will congratulate myself on having seamlessly answered one question immediately followed by a second, asked within the same milli-moment, then realise (after some hours of panic and initially fruitless searching) that I have put my purse in the fridge so the chain of logic has simply broken down at a different, less immediately obvious, point. The numbers of items I have lost track of because I have been doing something useful with them while concurrently ensuring something else happens are legion. 

If I could select the files to delete in order to function efficiently in the here and now, it is clear to me what they would be. The stash of embarrassing memories 1994-2001, for a start. The ones that make me curl my toes still, they have no place here. And that would, to be fair, liberate several gig, maybe even a terabyte. All the lyrics to ‘When will I be famous?’ by Bros, I think they can go away now. Obscure back routes between various no longer visited mid-Kent locations are no longer necessary to be saved, particularly since we purchased an up-to-date sat nav. 

But they stubbornly seem to remain, so I will be seeking my purse in domestic appliances a while longer, I fear.

Liz Ross Martyn

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