A Work in Progress

Last week I was wandering through the living room, aimless as a seventh grade boy trying to outline an essay.  That’s actually a false simile – seventh grade boys don’t outline. And it wasn’t quite aimlessness that had me roaming the house – it was confusion.  Like my seventh graders and their essays, I, too, had a clear aim. And, like them, I had absolutely no idea how to achieve it.  

We bought a house last month; the sheer, overwhelming mass of new tasks has debilitated me.  In my current 40-year-old incarnation I am an organized man, however I have found myself spinning under the enormity of my new responsibilities.  The new house, along with the joys and duties of raising a 3-year-old son and a 5-month-old daughter, have stripped away the scaffolding of organization and logistical prowess that I’ve assembled over the past twenty eight years and left me struggling to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.  I am again a twelve-year-old boy lost in the morass of obligation.

My wife finds me standing in the family room holding a pair of hedge trimmers, staring at the rug.  She suggests I go outside and trim something.  

One of the struggles that many boys encounter is having to do a little bit of a lot of things.  Twelve-year-old guys are often great at doing one thing. Think gaming, sports, hunting. Projects that have a singular goal.  Where they fall down is balancing tasks across a spectrum of responsibilities. Like…school. Disparate assignments in English, math, history, a foreign language, science confound them.  Because they don’t understand yet how each class interconnects into a larger whole, lots of boys struggle with how to do school.  

Right now all I want to do is clear ivy.  It’s incredibly gratifying and is a singular task.  I want to do it for hours on end, but instead, I can only do it in small stretches, in the cracks and gaps of my full, chaotic life.  My ivy work is interrupted by the calls to the utility companies, the ordering of furniture, the desperate cries of a baby, the screaming joy of a toddler, the procurement of food, the coordination of contractors (by my experience, men who enjoy work with a singular goal), and, of course, the gainful employment that makes it all possible.  

My to-do list grows a bit more every day and, frustratingly, I have crossed off very few items.  That’s because I’m somewhat or mostly done with a lot of them, but not all the way done. Enter long-term projects.  This is the Achilles heel of most of my students. They want to do all of it all at once, which most of the time is impossible.  Making incremental progress over a span of two or three weeks doesn’t come easy. So most of them save it up for the last day, and with the famous exceptions of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, that approach doesn’t work very well.  To fight this, I have my guys lay out their list of tasks, how long they’ll take, and when they’re due. Once these are on paper, stress tends to drop because the boys can better wrap their heads around the work to be done and, when each piece is complete, they can cross it off the list.

Like my twelve-year-olds and their projects, I just want my house done.  The landscaping set, the basement organized, the mirrors hung, the windows cleaned, the bookshelves built, the new lighting installed, the porch stairs redone, the window screens fixed, the locks changed, the French drain built, the this, the that, the other all complete.  This will never happen, obviously.  Life is a work in progress with an unannounced due date.  But like my guys, I’ve made a list of what I need to accomplish, how long I think it will take, and it’s priority level.  And, like my guys, I’m slowly checking things off.