These are hats I sort of expected to wear upon becoming a mom. There are a few hats, however, I’ve been forced to wear that I never could have dreamed up if I’d tried.

Who’d have thought, for example, that I, and I alone, had the skills necessary to put the Band-aid box back in the medicine cabinet and those little papers you pull off the Band-aid in the trash. I seem to be the only one qualified to do this job in my house.

Another job that I have a special talent for is turning off lights. The kids only got turning-on genes. Due to a genetic mutation, the skill required to move the hand in a downward motion over the switch was not passed on to my progeny. Hence, it is my duty to go around the house several times every evening saving the planet by turning off lights in unoccupied rooms.

Sadly, another gene gone awry in my family tree is the ability to see a mess. So I use another of my unique skills and make the mess visible to the vision-impaired by moving all items that need put away to the center of the room. The greater concentration of molecules creates a faint outline of the clutter so that, if they squint, they can actually see it. It’s kind of like giving a person a pair of glasses that lets them see in infrared.

I am also uniquely qualified to shut our utility room door, which I do numerous times a day. It’s right off the kitchen, and frankly, isn’t the best-kept room in the house. I don’t like looking into it, but due to the aforementioned vision disability, no one else sees anything in there at all, except the store of pop, which is the reason the door is opened so much. (A pop can only becomes a mess, and therefore invisible, after the last sip is drained.)