21 Things Only 'Type A' Moms Will Understand

1. Your birth plan made D-Day look haphazard.

2. You go to friends’ houses and secretly reorganize the silverware drawer while they’re in the bathroom.

3. Al Gore calls you to ask how much tuna per week is okay.

4. If you lost a hand, and the doctors offered you the option of either a hook or an artificial limb, you would choose the label maker.

5. Some women craft or knit; you laminate.

6. You have memorized the length of every red light in town. The fact that Google Maps doesn’t offer that information is totally baffling to you. Doesn’t everyone want to shave 23 seconds off the school run?

7. Other mothers buy purses with compartments, and you think that’s sweet. Your wallets have wallets. Your bag-within-a-bag system is so intricate that the final, smallest bag is the tiniest Ziploc in the world. It contains a single Altoid.

8. You do love mother-daughter bonding trips to Staples, but you often go alone, because a spiritual practice sometimes needs to be nourished in private.

9. Hannibal crossed the Alps with less gear than you take to the Jersey Shore.

10. You have a few rules about traveling: You must leave for a vacation with a completely empty fridge, but you may not throw away any food. This might mean eating a dinner of zucchini and peanut butter on the night before departure, but those are the rules; throwing out a perfectly good carton of eggs is against the rules. Taking them with you is okay, but your kids have commented that it’s weird how many hardboiled eggs are in your purse. In your special hardboiled-egg Ziploc.

11. All the men or roommates you’ve lived with now step out of the shower and pull the curtain to the precisely correct position to stave off mildew, even though you no longer live with them. Some women are remembered for the scent of their perfume or their silvery laugh—your exes think of you every time they straighten a towel on the towel rack in precise right angles.

12. One of your chief joys in life is to “go through that,” with that being the linen closet or the pencil pot or the garage. You love to sort, discard and reorganize. Other people have yoga retreats; you have the Container Store.

13. You don’t have a junk drawer. Your junk drawer has dividers, and one is labeled “misc”—and that is as close to a junk drawer as you will ever get.

14. You sell copies of your beach-trip packing list as a .jpeg on Etsy.

15. An alphabetized spice rack is for amateurs. Yours is cross-referenced both by purchase date and by frequency of use (obviously you need the cinnamon in the front, the chili towards the middle and the turmeric towards the back). You have patented a spice rack that is motorized and operates like the Scrambler at the county fair, presenting different spices depending on the sorting algorithm you’ve selected. Because…this is something everyone needs, right?

16. Sometimes someone in your household will put a spoon in the knife slot of the silverware divider and you wonder what kind of animals you live with.

17. Your husband used to be one of those “Let’s just drive and see how far we get, and then we’ll pull into a hotel when we’re tired” kind of guys. Maybe you put up with that once. But that night in a Cracker Barrel parking lot while you hummed the theme song to Deliverance was enough to make your husband believe in your powers of precise mileage calculation and Ramada-map-plotting. Now he just drives.

18. You can get a ton of stuff done in the evenings after the kids are in bed. People who are distracted by the Internet are weak.

19. Sometimes you are weak, and you hate yourself.

20. The calculation of how much child care you need to hire for how much work you can get done is a ratio as precise as the one NASA uses to calculate fuel versus weight when launching a space shuttle into orbit.

21. Yeah, you’re on top of things. You make the Gone Girl girl look like a pot-addled hippie.