I'm Running Late!

If there is one thing I will never completely understand about myself it is the fact that I am consistently late to life.

I have the best intentions.  I have a love for watches that has led me to collect them.*  I am surrounded by clocks in almost every room in my house.  And yet I am rarely on time to many of the appointments on my weekly list.

Now, those on the outside see this as a tragic flaw.  They either think one of two things:  she is rude or she is a control freak.  And, for the record, I try not to be a butt head and I'm working on the control issues.  But, I understand why you would feel that way because, when the entire family is running late for something, I often say "Hurry up!  It's RUDE to be late!", adeptly combining my knowledge of manners and control issues into one, short sentence.

For a bit, after the kids were born, I blamed them.  Then they grew up, went off to school five days a week, and it was just me responsible for being on time.  And, though I was more on time without kids in tow, I still wasn't ON TIME.

This week, I finally figured out the why behind the tardy after stumbling across and reading an article on chronic tardiness.  (Which, no doubt, made me late to the next thing I had to do.)

Turns out, those of us who have this illness are actually optimists.  We see the clock as our friend.  We figure out just how long it takes, in picture perfect, often once-in-a-lifetime scenarios, and we brand our brains with that amount of time for a given task.

So, if I caught every red light between here and the school and there was no cross-traffic to keep me from taking a left and no one was on the service road in the far right lane blocking my right, I could make it to pick up carpool in about seven minutes flat.

Problem is life is full of wrecks and stop lights that last too long and traffic jams that move traffic onto side roads.  And that means seven minutes is rarely enough time.

But, my brain remembers seven minutes of perfection.  And, it likes that amount of time.  And, it wants to suck every last second out of the task at hand before I have to get in the car and drive to the school.  So, it never gives a second thought to allowing ten or twelve minutes or, GASP, being early enough to be at the head of the line.

And, in a marriage where we BOTH deal with this issue, it is easy to see that this isn't an issue that will be solved overnight.  It's even easier to see that we have family and friends who are saints OR who have long fuses for time-challenged folk like us OR are just griping about us behind our backs.  Since we aren't on-time, though, we never hear the complaining.  Bonus!

I'm not sure I solved anything by learning this about myself, but I have been early to church two weeks in a row, so I guess that's a start. 

And, in admitting this, I guess I'm also issuing a blanket apology to those of you with brains that record worst-case time scenarios and who are chronically early or on-time.  Hopefully, next time I see you, I'll be a bit closer to our scheduled schedule.

All it will take is overriding the last time I met you at our chosen location.  And perfectly timed traffic.  
And a moon and stars that are aligned, a tide that is rising, and Jupiter in retrograde. 

Piece of cake!


*though I never actually WEAR them.