Who Remembers the Suncream

The suncream is not about the suncream.

It's about who, when they looked at the weather forecast yesterday, immediately added suncream to the mental running list they maintain about what the children will need tomorrow. It's about who, when packing the bag this morning, remembered not just the suncream but the fact that there's barely any left and we'll need a new one by Thursday. It's about who, when we got to the beach last week without suncream in the bag, was the one who said I thought you'd packed it.

The suncream is the entire conversation.

This is the anticipatory load: the work that happens before anyone asks you to do it, in the gaps between tasks, in the twenty minutes before you go somewhere when you are already thinking three steps ahead. It doesn't get put on any list because it predates the list. It's the thing that generates the list.

He's been learning to carry some of this. Not by being told — being told creates an instruction relationship, which still centres me as the holder of the list. By being given ownership of specific categories, fully, including the noticing. The medicine cabinet is his. The school supplies are his. When we run out of plasters, that is information for him, not for me.

We remembered the suncream this week. I didn't remember it. He did.

I don't know when that shifted. I just know that it did.