Mommy Deaf ?

It isn't that I talk incessantly.

Small kids, middle sized kids, teens, husbands.

They just don't "hear" Mom talking to them. You finish speaking and wait for a response. In the silence, the person you have been speaking to becomes aware of your presence, as if for the first time.

"Huh? Were you talking to me?"

There is a good reason women seem to talk twice as much as men do. They have to repeat everything.

When Tom and I first married, we rented a tiny little house with a huge backyard. One afternoon, I had supper almost ready, and went to the back door to call Chris and Bill inside to wash up. They were talking to a group of teens by the back fence. (The local teens loved to stop and talk to the boys- Chris had a deep, deep voice- very surprising in a five year old. And both boys were very articulate, very bright little kids.)
After several minutes, I went back and called the boys a second time to come in and eat.
I set the table, filled their plates... and had to go call them yet again.

I stood by the door this time, waiting for them to come in. As Chris passed inside, he says to me, "In case you were wondering why we didn't come the first two times you called us- it was because we didn't hear you."

oo-kay.

Nothing like a slip-up in your cover story.
That has always been one of our favorite Chris stories.

Benjamin has come up with a cure for Mommy Deafness. I was giving him instructions one day before leaving for work. Ben stuck a finger in one ear as I was speaking. I asked him what on earth he was doing. He says, "I am stopping up one of my ears to trap your words inside my head. Then what you tell me doesn't go in one ear and out of the other."

It works. If you need your kids (or spouse) to remember what you are telling them- having them stick a finger in one ear helps them to do so.