Bananas In My Basket

Cerebrum Matriarchalitis
A condition in which an invisible, globular alien parasite burrows through the ear into the brain of a human mother and consumes thoughts at random. Often contracted at the onset of pregnancy, the disease is chronic and incurable.

I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent person. I'm not a genius by any means, but I'm probably slightly above average. I skated through school and earned As and Bs in my classes with very little effort. I received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brigham Young University in English. But I also like math enough that I considered majoring in that too. I took Calculus and passed with an A. I am very creative. I am pretty good at solving mind bending and logic puzzles. Often, I can solve basic math problems in my head faster than my man who happens to be a darn good math teacher. By reading literally thousands of books, I have expanded my knowledge into areas that I did not formally study in school: neurology and psychology to name a few.

Despite all this knowledge and education, sometimes I suffer from attacks of absentmindedness. These attacks did not begin until I had children. I honestly believe that because of the way your body changes during pregnancy, the wild fluctuation of hormones, and the decrease of restorative sleep, it literally changes the way your brain functions. Either that or there really is an alien parasite stealing thoughts from me. You know how you set something down for a second and suddenly can't find it anywhere. Or you end up at the top of three flights of stairs and have no idea why you just climbed up all those stairs in the first place. Or you are staring at your five-year-old firstborn son and literally have no idea what his name is. Sometimes it is just so hard to think.

Well, I had an episode yesterday.

After dropping off JayJay at Kindergarten and Max at Preschool, I took Third to the grocery store to do some shopping. Our family receives WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) assistance from the government. It's a program to provide healthy food to low income families. My husband teaches math and coaches football and wrestling to support us, but a teacher's income is extremely small, particularly in our state. After paying bills we often only have $20 left to buy groceries for the month. We do not have credit card or auto debt and we do not buy television services. I am explaining this because I am paranoid of being judged. We need WIC and it has honestly saved us from starvation.

Anyway, I selected some WIC checks to redeem and went through the store picking the items off the shelves. After gathering the baby food, milk, eggs, and bread, I went to the produce section to finish up my shopping. I had a $6 WIC check for fresh produce. I got a head of lettuce and a bag of onions and put them in my cart. I needed bananas and selected a bunch. Then I went to the scale and weighed them to find out how much they would cost. With the lettuce, onions, and bananas I had $1.66 left on the check to use. I wandered through the produce section, looking at apples, bagged salads, and citruses, trying to decide what else I could afford. Eventually I settled on green peppers. They were $.69 each. I could get two and that would get me close enough to $6 that I wouldn't feel like was wasting money. I bagged them and put them in the cart. Then I headed to the check out stand.

I am just going to insert here that my checker was a stellar employee. Usually, the checkers I get are indifferent. Some are obviously irritated that I am taking so long in their line. One in particular talked about how she is on WIC too, but then she chatted about how her family buys donuts every Monday and her kids don't understand why they can't buy donuts with WIC checks. It's my opinion that if you are on WIC, you can't afford donuts. We certainly can't. There I go judging someone else on WIC. That's exactly what I'm afraid of. Now I've vented. Sorry.

So my checker yesterday was fabulous. She chatted with me about my baby and about her twins. When it came time to check out my produce, the total came to slightly over $4.

"Wow," I thought. "The membership card here gets me a really good deal on produce!"

Rather than let me leave with $2 wasted on my WIC check, she insisted that I get more produce. But instead of sending me running to the produce section to frantically select more, she offered suggestions of what items would be affordable and then sent a bagger to get them for me. In the end, I acquired a lemon, a lime, and a cucumber in addition to my original selection. The total was $5.99. She was awesome!

I left the grocery store feeling pretty good about things. I went home, unloaded the groceries from the car, and put them away. Then my day continued: picking up kids from school, lunch at the high school with my man, back home again to help with homework and clean, swimming lessons at six, home for dinner, and then bedtime. After the kids were in bed, I surfed the internet and chatted on Facebook with friends until my man came home late after a football game. Then I went to bed too.

It wasn't until after midnight when I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep that I realized what I had done.

No bananas.

After weighing them and calculating their price, I simply forgot to lift them from the scale and set them in my cart. And I never thought about them again. Not when I walked back and forth near them in the produce section trying to figure out what else to get. Not when the cost of my produce inexplicably didn't add up at the checkout stand the way I had calculated it should. Not when I put away the groceries in my home. Not once in all those hours and actions did I wonder where those bananas were.

It was a definite attack of Cerebrum Matriarchalitis. Or I'm totally and completely bananas in my basket. Thank goodness I never set my baby down.