Forget-me-nots

An official MS flower

 

Do you have a favorite flower, friends? I am not just asking my female readers; men can appreciate flowers too. Although their flowering tastes likely go to something masculine like a braided money tree or a Venus fly trap (both of which are actually plants but so what?) Men enjoy money, eating things and things that eat things, so these plants are great for them.

But speaking of eating things, men may also enjoy edible flowers with a sports theme like the bouquet I found below. Or, maybe a flower that reminds them of a night out with their buddies, like the red hot poker flower.

 

One time a beau called my mom and asked what my favorite flower was before he sent me a surprise. Yes, he was a keeper but try as I did, I wasn’t able to keep him. She didn’t know and so she tried to casually call and ask me. I didn’t know either. And frankly, if I did know, I likely would have forgotten.

Which brings me to the basis of this particular blog. It is spring time and spring reminds us of flowers. But lately, what I have been reminded of is all the things I keep forgetting.

I told you last week that when parking my car I forgot to put it in park. How does one forget that? Drive, means drive so you move the gear shift to the D symbol. Shouldn’t it be easy to remember to move the little symbol to the P for park when you want to park?

You would think so but then I did it again when I was recently driving my mom’s car. (Shhhh- don’t tell her. She will totally freak out!) Luckily, I was still in the car when this happened and so I was able to quickly remedy the situation.

Later that same day, I forgot I was driving her car. I told my sister that we needed to go get mom’s car even though we were already in it.

Speaking of my mom, I thought it would be nice to send her a surprise for mother’s day from her whole family. I ordered online, typed out the card on the form and hit send. My mom’s family consists of her three daughters, (I am one of them in case any readers are having a brain fog kind of day,) and her five grandsons.

Here is what I wrote on the card-

Happy Mother’s Day from your loving daughters and nephews

The next day I was brushing my teeth when I realized my mistake. The boys I meant to include in the card were my nephews, but her grandsons. What was really upsetting was why I remembered that while brushing my teeth.

Sometimes it is not my fault when I forget something. Like the two times I have forgotten that milk belongs in the refrigerator, not the pantry. Doesn’t it make more sense that milk would be kept in the pantry, right next to the cereal, the peanut butter and the cookies, where it is paired so well?

The other day I was looking at my website and my name looked off. I thought my wonderful web guru Michael of Kemp Resources had misspelled my name and I was bummed that the website had been up over a year and I had never noticed. I got distracted for a bit and when I looked again, my name was right. My web guy hadn’t messed up. I had briefly forgotten how to spell my name.

The weirdest thing I have been forgetting lately is how to swallow. Swallowing isn’t something you should have to remember; you should just do it. The youngest of my nephews (my mom’s grandsons even though I called them her nephews on her card, just keeping things clear,) have been swallowing on their own since they were tiny babies. So how come I have trouble remembering how to do it?

This forgetting to swallow doesn’t happen when I am eating or drinking and it usually happens at night. I am joking about it here, (cause that’s what I do- take that MS!) but it is actually very scary. Slight panic ensues and I have to stop, calm down, and desperately try to remember how to swallow.

I have talked to other people with multiple sclerosis and it turns out this memory lapse is quite common, as opposed to all of our other memory lapses that are slightly less common.

It is important that I do some research on each of my blogs so I spent five seconds looking up how swallowing works. Turns out, in the long, complicated, Google description, words like ‘complex process’, ‘neuromuscular’ and ‘controlled by neurological mechanisms,’ are part of the descriptions. It makes sense then, that it would be something our MS brains would forget how to do.

 

So this spring while I am forgetting important things, I have no clue or memory what my favorite flower is or should be. Then it came to me, forget-me-nots! What a perfect flower for us MS’er’s, the flower that just screams to be remembered……

In further researching this blog I looked up forget-me-nots and learned some information that made me even more convinced that they should be the official flower of multiple sclerosis. They can only tolerate partial sun and enjoy the shade even though they need some sun! How perfect for MS’ers is that?

They like moist habitats. Ok, that one is a stretch. But, while they can exist anywhere, they are most common in Northern Hemispheres, just like my MS friends and I.

They don’t come in orange, the official MS color chosen because all the other cool colors were taken.

 

And they are not the prettiest flower, but so what? MS isn’t very pretty either. But when you see a bunch of forget-me-nots, they are absolutely lovely to behold-just like my MS friends!

Plus, how can you possibly forget their name? Well, give me a few minutes and I probably will….

 

Only one more week to enter the What’s in a Name contest friends!!!! Go to the What’s in the Name Blog post and help me title my upcoming book for a prize! Contest ends 5/24/13.

Daffodil picture courtesy of Barbara Epich Struna http://barbarastruna.blogspot.com/

Image courtesy of [89 studio] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of [Jomphong] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of [renjith krishnan] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of [smarnad] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net