Apparently Mum Knows Where Everything Is

There is a strange promotion that happens when you become a mum. Nobody mentions it beforehand and there is no pay rise, but at some point you become Head of Finding Things.

This morning I was standing in the kitchen, completely naked, making coffee when somebody shouted, “Mum, where’s my hoodie?”

Now, there are two important details here.

Firstly, it is the first morning of October, so apparently every hoodie we own has suddenly become essential equipment. Secondly, I was the only person in the house who wasn’t actually wearing any clothes.

And yet I knew where the hoodie was.

“Back of the chair in the living room.”

“It’s not there.”

“It is.”

“It isn’t.”

That sentence does something to mothers.

Because it isn’t there rarely means it isn’t there.

It means: I have stood approximately four feet from the object and briefly moved my eyes in its general direction.

So off I went.

There it was.

On the back of the chair.

The really irritating part is that I didn’t even have to look properly. I walked into the room, pointed at it and left, like some sort of naked Welsh sniffer dog.

Five minutes later somebody couldn’t find a charger.

“Beside the sofa.”

“No it’s not.”

Reader, it was beside the sofa.

Then came a missing water bottle, followed by somebody asking whether we’d run out of cereal while standing in front of a cupboard containing enough cereal to survive a minor national emergency.

By this point I was beginning to wonder whether motherhood changes your eyesight.

Perhaps there is a previously undiscovered maternal evolutionary process where, after giving birth, women develop the ability to detect lost PE bags through walls.

Except there can’t be, because I am spectacularly incapable of finding my own things.

I can locate somebody else’s left trainer underneath a towel behind a bedroom door from another floor of the house, but I spent ten minutes yesterday looking for my phone while holding it.

That is the ADHD bit that really takes the biscuit.

Everyone else apparently believes I possess an internal map of every movable object in the building, while my own brain operates more like a badly organised car boot sale.

I know exactly where your black T-shirt is.

I have no idea why I walked into the kitchen.

I can tell you which drawer contains the batteries.

I cannot tell you where I put the coffee I made three minutes ago.

Naturism should technically make my contribution to household lost property considerably smaller. I don’t leave jumpers draped over things. I don’t abandon jeans downstairs. I cannot possibly have misplaced my cardigan because I wasn’t wearing one in the first place.

Yet somehow this has merely freed up additional brain capacity for everybody else’s possessions.

And perhaps that’s the bit of mum life that makes me laugh. Not because mothers are magically better at finding things, and certainly not because women are genetically programmed to know where the Sellotape lives. It’s because somewhere along the way, one person can quietly become the household memory bank.

You notice where something was dropped. You remember who wore what yesterday. You moved the bottle when you wiped the table.

You know there’s another packet behind the first packet because you bought the bloody packets.

Individually, they’re tiny things.

Together, they’re an extraordinary amount of information rattling around one person’s head while she’s also trying to remember whether she actually drank that coffee.

I eventually found mine.

In the microwave.

I hadn’t reheated it.

I’d just put it in there.

No idea.

Anyway, if anyone needs me, apparently I know where everything is.

Except my glasses.

Has anyone seen my glasses?

And in your house, who has somehow become the designated finder of absolutely everything?