I lied to my best friend.

We hadn’t seen each other in a year – a year! – when we finally met for coffee the day after Thanksgiving. Her baby daughter is 9 months old and adorable, and even though I was meeting her for the first time, I felt like I’d known her forever. She’s just an extension of my friend. I scooped her up and marveled at her features while she played with my hair.

My friend was adorable, too. She had claimed previously that she was a mess, her house was a mess, her car was a mess. To me, it all looked normal. She looked exactly the same — gorgeous and willowy thin, like always (bitch). Her house and car look like they have a kid in the family, and for a mom like me with three of them at home, it didn’t seem messy. It seemed normal.

After 20 years of friendship, we have watched each other date boys, break up with boys, marry men, move to different states, land jobs, leave jobs, and move again. Having babies is just another one of those major life changes.

As we tried to discuss a year’s worth of topics within the span of a few hours, she said “I just feel like I can’t remember ANYTHING anymore. I am so scatterbrained.”

And that is when I told the lie.

I nodded in understanding and said, “It’ll be okay.”

I blamed her lack of mental focus on lack of sleep and waved it away, like it was nothing to worry about. The truth is, IT WON’T BE OKAY. AT ALL. It’s not going to go away and it won’t get better. From my experience, the scatterbrained-ness seems to mushroom with each kid and eventually you just sort of learn to live with it. You just adapt to being stupid.

Tonight I lost a pod of dishwashing detergent. One minute I had it in my hand, and the next minute I didn’t. Where the hell did it go?! Did I set it down somewhere? Throw it away? Put it back in the bag? I honestly have no idea. Robbie helped me look for it, and confirmed it was not sitting somewhere in plain sight. Not that I’ve ever completely overlooked something and nearly cried with frustration only to have him pick it up out of whatever obvious place it was located and hand it to me condescendingly. Nope. That has never happened.

Anyway, at this point I will just have to hope that one of the kids don’t find the pod first … wherever it is. I have forgotten more tampons, appointments, and essential pieces of information in the past year than I have in my entire adult life. And yet, we’re all still here, functioning at what appears to be an acceptable level.

So maybe what I said wasn’t a total lie.

Maybe it was actually the truth.