The problem with becoming a parent later in life is that, by the time your kids are beginning to flex their get-away-with-things muscles, your memory is not as good as it used to be. Certainly not good enough to match the duct tape quality stickiness of a kid’s ability to remember everything you say, or said…once, or might have said, or never said, though it sounds like something you could have said.

Maybe.

What was I saying?

I’m sure you’ve familiar with some version of the following. It’s nine o’clock at night, and your kid is fixing a chocolate fudge ice cream sundae with a Mountain Dew chaser. Guaranteed to keep an 8-year old awake until her SATs. When you ask the useless rhetorical question “Who gave you permission to have that?” as you prepare to throw your wife under the bad parent express bus, your daughter comes back with “You did, Daddy. Remember when (insert some conversation you have no recollection of).”

According to the Harvard Medical School, it’s normal to forget things from time to time, and it’s normal to become somewhat more forgetful as you age. They identify seven normal memory problems – Transience, Absentmindedness, Blocking, Misattribution, Suggestibility, Bias, and Persistence.

Absentmindedness, the memory trait that plays right into your daughter’s hands, occurs when you don’t pay close enough attention to what you were doing or what was being said.  You forget where you put your wallet or phone because you didn’t focus on where you put them in the first place. Your mind was occupied with something else, so your brain didn’t safely store the information.

The later it gets in the day, the less likely you are paying attention, which is what probably the case with your daughter’s drippy, dream dessert. At this point you have two choices. Either you exert your parental authority and veto the sugar caffeine tsunami, contradicting yourself in the process, which will come back to haunt you at a future inconvenient time. Or, you chalk it up to a) not listening, or b) not remembering, or c) what were we talking about?