Are We There Yet? Her motto: Seek and ye shall find ... sometimes Lori Clinch   As a mother, I have many duties assigned to me. I am a domestic goddess, the head bookkeeper and person in charge of communications. I excel in public relations, thrive as activities director, and have been known to rev up enough enthusiasm to get the troops to unload the dishwasher. Yet, I lack the ability to find things. I don't know where I put the backpacks or baseball uniforms, and although I once had great intentions of returning the children's report cards on time, their location remained a mystery until sometime in late August, when I went to stash the plastic wrap in an unused bread box. While I would love to open a cupboard and admire its theme, I can't seem to decide whether the cabinet to the right of the sink should be called the Haven for Weird Cooking Utensils or the Cozy Corner for Cayenne Spices. Despite the fact that no one in this house has had a need for a bobby pin in over 36 years, we house one in every drawer - along with a rubber band, a bread tie and a pen that has not produced ink since 1986. Although my family is well aware of my inability to keep track of things, they often come to me as if their items were little lambs and I was their shepherd. "Mom, have you seen my iPod?" "Where is my basketball?" "My jacket was sitting right here and now it's gone! What did you do with it?" "Have you seen my shoes, my bat, my MP3?" These things they ask from a woman who goes to the kitchen on a dead run and then stops dead in her tracks as she tries to remember why she went there. "Hey, Mom," one son rattled off the other night, "my 18-page, hard-bound, double-spaced application for basketball camp is due tomorrow. Have you seen it?" "I don't know, what's it look like?" "It's like a bunch of papers with words on it, and they're like in English." "I'm not sure. Did you check the sewing box?" "Do we have a sewing box?" "I'm not sure. Try your father's workbench, the clothes hamper and the pocket of my green housecoat." "Why would my application be in the pocket of your housecoat?" "For the same reasons that the checkbook turned up in the potato drawer back in 2001. There are forces at work here that none of us can comprehend." Losing something that is important to my husband is the absolute worst. While the rest of us can easily concede to the fact that aliens are taking over our lives and hiding our stuff, he chooses to believe that lost items have to be somewhere and that all one truly needs to do is look. He'll start in the normal places such as the glove box and the vegetable crisper, and then he'll go through some form of a transformation. He is normally an easygoing and happy-go-lucky male but will evolve into a man on a mission who searches through my nightstand and rummages magazine racks. He empties the laundry hampers, tosses out my coupon box and then chastises me for my lack of organization in the medicine cabinets. He's been known to sort the contents on my desk, dump out my sock drawer, and has had the nerve to search through the boxes of cherished items that I have stashed under the bed, and he deems them trash. He messed up the whole house one day while I ran behind him, pleading, "Please stop looking, I'll find it for you. Don't open that door! Don't open that one either! Will you stop opening stuff? Are you insane?" He then lectures me on an unorganized existence, reflects back to his pre-me days and brags about how he once knew a guy who knew a guy who could lay his hands on a pencil anytime he wanted one. "It's the kids that take the pencils," I replied in my defense. "That may be, but they didn't lose my shoe." "How would you know? Besides, what on earth would I do with a size 10 brown oxford?" He shook his head and said to no one in particular, "This I hear from the same woman who stuck a gardenia in my work boot and called it creative." What this house needs is a director of lost causes. Lori Clinch is the mother of four sons and the author of the book "Are We There Yet?" You can reach her at www.loriclinch.com.