When I found out I was pregnant for the first time, lo those many years ago, I started reading just about everything I could get my hands on that pertained to pregnancy and childbirth. I learned how to sleep on my right side so the growing fetus did not crush my stomach and intestines. I found out I wasn’t allowed to eat soft cheeses (I kind of wish I had learned that tidbit before I spent every night of 
my first trimester eating a tub of Wispride port wine and cheddar.) I incorporated the principles of husband-coached childbirth, which, oddly enough, did not include swinging a bat at him during labor. I was totally prepared. If my baby had been made out of words and I could have birthed him by setting pen to paper, I would have been all set.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. But, ever the optimist, I kept reading. My bookshelves started to fill and my Stephen King novels were pushed aside for titles such as, “The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding,” and, “Your Baby and Child: Birth to Age Five.” I sometimes think Stephen King should have written a book on child rearing. There were nights when I may have been consoled by the suggestion that my child was actually possessed by demons and there was nothing to be done but feed him dead spiders and/or burn down the house.
One of the hardest things for most mothers to deal with is their child’s inability to understand that when we close the bathroom door, we have not been sucked into a vortex which will transport us to another dimension. First, we’re not that lucky. Second, I don’t think it could have made it through the mountain of bath toys. Instead, we’re just on the other side, listening to our offspring scream and/or watching the doorknob jostle as they try desperately to master hand-eye coordination before we can pull up our pants.
As I jammed one foot against the closed door, I read up on this exasperating phenomenon and learned it was a lack of object permanence. According to Simply Psychology, “Infancy is characterized by extreme egocentrism, where the child has no understanding of the world other than their own current point of view….Object permanence means knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden.”
Learning about object permanence was the beginning of a tremendous period of enlightenment for me. It was like the heavens had opened up and God himself said, “Now do you get it?” And I did. I finally understood the anguish and fear my baby must have experienced each time I went out to get the mail or hid behind my bedroom door with the dregs of a bag of potato chips and a sippy-cup full of wine.
I also understood that for some people, object permanence never happens. For some people, even adult people, once they walk out of the bedroom, the wet towel they left on the bed ceases to exist. The footwear they take off, immediately upon entering the house, is not actually waiting to trip the next poor idiot who walks through, not expecting a pair of boots directly in their path. Because if one has no sense of object permanence, then the boots are not really there. Except they actually are.
It’s sort of like the question, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it really make a sound?” Only it’s not like that at all. Because we don’t live in the forest and I am always there to hear the weird and angry sounds I make when I’m trying not to face-plant into the wall.
His lack of object permanence mostly manifests with personal items, like dirty socks on the radiator. Though my husband doesn’t seem to notice that the fabric that enveloped his feet— inside his boots — for the last 14 hours, is only inches from his pillow, he knows I do notice them. He knows that any place — any single place in the whole world — is a better location for dirty socks. So he’s taken to knocking them onto the floor, in hopes of avoiding my banshee-scream and the fit of unbridled rage that will surely follow. Because putting them in the hamper is clearly out of the question.
Other people in my house also seem to suffer from this conceptual deficiency. For instance, some of them don’t see the stack of dirty towels in their room and think they have zero towels when they actually have 12. This leads to terrible tragedies, like mom needing to shower, opening the cabinet for a towel, and finding only a guest towel or a beach towel. It was like telling me I’d have to decide which of my children gets to live a normal life and which has to be a kindergarten teacher (seriously, that’s a terrifying fate. I still remember the bin of extra pants in my kindergarten classroom for the kids who peed themselves. Guess which adult has to help them untie their wet shoes? That’s a nope.)
As I shamefully dried myself with screen-printed seashells and smiling seahorses, I contemplated the many ways I had failed as a wife and mother. I also thought about how many millions of dollars I could make if I found a way to fast-track object permanence. From cradle to mid-life crisis, it is a plague upon us all.
I intended to end this with an unseasonable, but cute, recipe for spider cookies or some other adorable confection. But do you know what happens when you google “recipe spider?” You get a recipe for fried tarantula. With a photo. The internet is a terrifying place. If you’re willing to be scarred for life, you can find the whole awfulness here.
