I'm becoming my mother

Actually, that's not true. I was going to say I'm becoming my mother because I keep losing things, but the thing I have currently lost is my birth certificate, and there's no way my mother would EVER lose a birth certificate. She loses things like keys and glasses, often while they are on her person, but she has a filing system so regimented the Dewey Decimal System looks like chaos beside it. She has helped me file in the past, so I have all kinds of neatly labeled folders (one for each individual piece of paper, practically), but of course many of the papers have wandered away in the intervening time, and one of the wanderers is my birth certificate, which I need. I need my birth certificate so I can get a passport so I can go to Italy. I must go to Italy.

I know I saw the stupid thing recently. I have spent the whole day tearing apart the house looking for this one piece of paper, and the kids have kindly contributed by also tearing the house apart in mute (oh how I wish it were really mute) protest of my single-mindedness. The messes at adult height are all of the ransacked-paper-tray variety. The under-four-foot messes resemble the handiwork of insane but resourceful monkeys. I just took a 5 minute break from my obsessive search to clear a path through the dining room and, among other things, had to separate rice from playdoh.

Break over, back to the search.