So there I was, sitting in my Sunday church meeting, attempting to soothe my squirmy 18-month-old daughter on my lap while simultaneously listening to the speaker. My eyes bounced from my 7-year-old daughter to my nearly 4-year-old son, satisfied that, for the moment, they too were sitting relatively still. Suddenly, my mother, who was visiting for the day, leaned over to me and uttered some unexpected words:
“Lisa, I think your shirt is on inside out.”
My attention on the meeting came to a screeching halt.
“What?” I asked, looking down to the cream-colored top with black polka dots. At first glance, I thought she’d made a mistake, then my eyes focused on the seam running down the side of my torso.
Gulp. She was right. How did this happen? Had anyone else seen?
The first question seems to have an obvious answer. How did this happen? I’m a mom, that’s how it happened. Scurrying to get out the door for our church meeting, the last thing I have time for is a final check in the mirror or, heaven forbid, any extra primping time.
Still, the nature of the pattern on the shirt and the fact that I was sitting in the pew with a child on my lap, I felt relatively safe in assuming no one else had noticed. After all, neither my mother, nor my husband, nor my kids for that matter, had noticed anything until now. I would have plenty of time to slip into the bathroom in between meetings and make the change.
That idea was shattered when, during a transition in the meeting, a friend of mine across the aisle reached out to my husband and whispered, “I think Lisa has her shirt on inside out.”
OK. Apparently it was obvious. I had to act fast. Taking my baby with me as a decoy — and because she was likely to start screaming if I set her down — I slipped out of the meeting as quickly as I could, whisked my way down to the bathroom and turned my shirt right side out. I was back in in less than 2 minutes. Maybe nobody noticed.
Again, I was wrong. One less-than-subtle woman ribbed me about the situation in the hall after church, seemingly unaware that her boisterous recounting of the tale might make me slightly uncomfortable. I smiled, made some self-deprecating comment and hurried to my car.
All I could do was laugh, partly because, this is not the first time something like this has happened. Although the details remain fuzzy in my mind, I know of one other inside out shirt situation in recent years. And then there’s the time I was interrupted while applying my makeup before work and discovered, HOURS later, that I had left the house and interacted with many people with eye makeup on one eye only.
Sheesh. Maybe I’m going insane.
Am I the only person who has ever done something so flaky or forgetful? I dare say I am not. And therein lies the humor, but also the reality of what is often referred to as “Mommy Brain.”
In my younger years I might have disputed the idea of “Mommy Brain” as a copout, but not anymore. My once naïve single person view of life has been replaced with a savvy, mom-of-three, trying-to-answer-five-questions-at-a-time, taking-multi-tasking-to-a-new-level, running-on-fumes, still-trying-to-appear-sane kind of a mentality that, unfortunately, occasionally catches up to me.
I bet if you think for even a moment, you can come up with a time it has caught up to you. And then, you should share it with me here, because, it’s just funnier when we can laugh at ourselves together.
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