The One Who Keeps the Calendar

Someone in your household is the calendar.

Not the one on the wall, or the app on the phone. The human one: the person who holds the household schedule in their head, in something like real time, and can tell you at any moment what's coming, what's already been arranged, what needs to be confirmed, and what has been forgotten by someone who was supposed to remember it.

This person is almost never a man.

I have been the calendar for a long time. Not because I was told to be. Because I started holding things — a date here, an appointment there — and never stopped, and the accumulation of things I was holding eventually became the household's schedule, and I became the person you asked when you needed to know something.

The problem with being the calendar is that you can't be somewhere else at the same time. You can't rest while you're running. The calendar doesn't stop just because you're tired.

He has taken over the school-related half of the calendar. Fully: the term dates, the events, the teacher meetings, the things the school sends home that need to go in the diary. His section. His to know.

The first time he told me something I didn't already know — not because I'd told him, but because he'd found it himself and added it — I had to sit with the feeling that produced. Something between relief and the strange vertigo of not being needed.

I am getting used to the vertigo.