Running Late

I have the idea that I can get to work in nine minutes. I think I got this idea because it happened. Once. One morning, probably a few years back, every single light was green, there was no traffic, the planets were aligned, and I arrived at work in a miraculous nine minutes.

The problem is that, at that moment, my brain reset my expectation for how long it takes to get to work. Click! Nine minutes. Never mind that the other 2047 times, it has taken me twelve minutes, or at least eleven.

When I am cooking my two eggs and gathering up, I don't see a problem when the clock says it's ten minutes until I am expected at work--because I think I can make it in nine. It's like the "Best Times" feature on Minesweeper. If you once played a game in nine seconds, it retains that. It doesn't average your scores.

Realizing that this is nuts has led me to wonder if I do this in other areas--and to think about other people's expectations, too. For example, someone I live with always seems to think he has more time than he has. And that things take less time to do than they do.

I'm apparently the same to some extent.

I may have gotten this tendency from my mother. She never started Christmas shopping until December 22, at the earliest. And she had eight kids and a zillion grandkids. She always pulled off Christmas somehow, but usually with zero sleep the night before. And I have childhood memories of fighting with my brothers and sisters and doing forbidden somersaults over the back of the couch that had been pulled away from the window for the expected Christmas tree (never purchased before December 22 either) while she and Dad shopped from dawn to midnight.

She never did taxes until April 15.

When it was time for me to leave to go to my wedding, she was still sewing the buttonholes onto my wedding dress. I remember waiting nervously in my slip for a prom dress, wondering which would arrive first--it or my date. And I ran to my first day of fifth grade late and pinned into my new green star dress.

I don't know why she did things this way. It seems not to have occurred to her that she didn't have to. In more important ways, she was a very on-the-ball mom. The best.

For myself, I can't stand that kind of stress. I consciously and deliberately changed some of this in my own life. When I was a single mom struggling to pay a $306 mortgage and a $500 day care payment (not to mention food and utilities) out of two $404 checks a month, I felt more secure making sure--before December 22--that my kids would get Christmas. One Columbus Day (back when state employees still got all their holidays), it dawned on me that while I was off and my kids were in school, I could just take myself to the store and secure Christmas then and there. Yes, in October. Why not?

A tradition was born. I get the main shopping done before I would have to fight the crowds and the weather. My anxiety thermometer stays at a comfortable level, too. As December creeps along, I have none of that research-paper-due type of stress mounting up on the back of my neck. I know that, whatever happens, my kids will have Christmas. In other ways, I haven't wised up yet.

I think the procrastination problem could be genetic. I have a child who likes to run things in a very last-minute fashion. He's charming enough to pull it off. He once got a teacher to postpone a deadline for him seven times. He likes to surprise me with last-minute requests--like, do we have any purple pants he could use for a costume? I told him I thought his six-year-old sister had some. (Does he seriously think I keep things like that handy, just in case?)

I'm sure something in my past asked for this. But I'm working on it. I have learned to consider the time church starts as 12:15, not 12:30. I have been learning to exercise, do laundry, and--with less success--clean my house on a schedule instead of on an as-needed (translation: last-minute) basis. Maybe I can knock down my mind-sets one at a time, even the one about how long it takes to get to work.