Procrastination

I know I said I'd write a post on this theme a while back, but I kept putting it off. [See what I did there? Ha, that's called humor!]

Seriously, though: "Hi, my name is GeekMom and I am a procrastinator." If there isn't a Twelve Step Program for this, there ought to be. Although I can appeal to a Higher Power all I like, my affliction doesn't seem to improve. Only fear seems to work: fear of public humiliation, fear of not meeting a deadline, fear of the stern look of disapproval on an authority figure's face. I have to create my own deadline for these blog entries and be my own stern authority figure in order to get them out in a timely fashion.

If there's a way of putting something off, I will, especially if it involves the writing down of coherent thought, or the filling out of forms. Thank God for accountants, or I would be under investigation by the IRS for never filing my taxes. But there are many other things one can put off nearly endlessly: trimming the hedge, washing the kitchen floor, taking the pets to the vet,  getting the car inspected, sending thank-you letters, doing the laundry, writing a blog entry on procrastination.... Paradoxically, these can all be used as procrastination devices in turn for an even more onerous task, such as organizing one's office files. I find I never have a cleaner kitchen than when I'm preparing to do some filing.

Toad's To-Do List

I wasn't always a procrastinator. As a young child, I constantly drew up schedules for myself and followed them rigorously. I would cross out each item as it was accomplished, as Toad did in Arnold Lobel's story "The List" that appears in his book, Frog and Toad Together. In elementary school, I always did my assignments as soon as possible. My mother was suspicious that I never seemed to have homework, because I would do it during lunch and recess and leave it in my desk at school (Yeah, I was a serious nerd, even at age 7).

Once I got to junior high, smaller assignments would be done while having my milk and cookies after school at the kitchen table, larger assignments would be done a week in advance. I would wait until the deadline to hand them in, though, so I wouldn't provoke the jealous ire (or ridicule) of my classmates. By then I was getting an inkling that being a nerd was not going to be a social advantage.

By high school, however, I was starting to slip. I'd do the last of my trig homework at midnight, or finish copying a paper over at breakfast (back when papers were written in cursive in pen--only our term papers required a typewriter (What's a typewriter, you ask? Oh Lord, you're making me feel old!)). I'd find myself folding my laundry or sharpening all my pencils or making myself increasingly elaborate snacks as the night wore on, while successfully avoiding any actual work.

 Then, with college and its concomitant lack of parental supervision and parentally supervised bedtimes came the dreaded All-Nighter, with its many cups of coffee and bleary, staring eyes, as I racked a brain that had mysteriously gone blank in my frantic quest for tree imagery in As You Like It or examples of the commodification of women in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. And finally appeared the fair and bewitching apparition of The Extension. Oh joy! To be given a day, two days, a week extra in order to complete a paper! Of course, you had to grovel before the Dean, but I learned to take groveling to a high art. I once callously used the premature and tragic death of someone I slightly knew from high school as an excuse for why I couldn't finish the paper in time, overcome as I was with grief at his passing. Even now I squirm with shame as I make my confession. Yes, I was shameless back then. And I still ended up staying all night to finish the paper, as I wrote nothing at all in the intervening week of grace.

So why do I procrastinate, if it makes my life so miserable? Why do any of us procrastinate? Well, as I'm a word geek, let's start with the origins of the word. It comes from Latin, the pro- meaning "forward," and crastinus meaning "of tomorrow" and its first known use was in 1548 by Edward Hall in a non-pejorative sense, to describe events leading to a wedding between two illustrious families being delayed by agreement. It wasn't until the mid-eighteenth century, according to Ferrari, Johnson, and McCown in their book, Procrastination and Task Avoidance: Theory, Research and Treatment, that procrastination began to take on its current, negative connotations. Schraw, Wadkins, and Olafson, in their paper, "Doing the things we do: A Grounded theory of academic procrastination" (Journal of Educational Psychology, Feb 2007, 12-25), have stated that, for the putting off of a task to be considered procrastination, it must meet these three criteria: it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying. The "delaying" bit seems obvious; the other two not quite as much, but, after some thought, it becomes clear that these other two conditions must also hold true if a delay is clearly to be called procrastination. If you delay finishing a task because there is a fire in the building, you cannot be said to be procrastinating. If you delay finishing a task because you want to bake chocolate chip cookies first, it is procrastination. There is a sense that all the attempted definitions of procrastination ultimately point to a sort of psychological disorder.

In James Surowiecki's review in the New Yorker of the collection of essays entitled The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination (ed. Andreou and White, Oxford: 2012),  he says:

You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”

 Wow. The Fluidity of Human Identity. The Basic Impulse. I like that. So when I put off working on this blog entry, I am only experiencing the flow of my own identity, and am succumbing to that basic human impulse–to delay as long as possible. It's not a psychological disorder–it's human nature!

There are attempts at a Freudian definition of procrastination as the use of the pleasure principle to avert the stress and anxiety caused by the deadline for a difficult task, and there is the physiological definition of it as a struggle between the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of executive brain function--things like planning, impulse control, and attention--and the limbic system, which governs things like emotion, behavior, and motivation. This whole argument, though perhaps not rigidly scientifically explained, is discussed quite charmingly by a young British vlogger called Charlie McDonnell in the video below:

"Stop Procrastinating" from charlieissocoollike on YouTube

Charlie also gives helpful advice on how to avoid the temptation to procrastinate. This particular vlog entry, I might add, is about his inability to get to work on his video log, just as the subject of my blog is how I've been procrastinating on my blog. My, it's all so meta!

For me, however, procrastination has become a way of life. I have actually been accused of thriving on it, which makes me crazy, because I hate the feelings of stress and desperation induced by prolonged procrastination. On the other hand, there is something about the rapidly diminishing minutes that drives an adrenaline push to that final effort, and there have been times when the pressure of the time crunch has led me to make certain leaps in thinking that might not have occurred to me had I been working in a more leisurely manner. So maybe my accusers aren't entirely wrong about this. Procrastination: it's not all bad.

My Mother's Day Problem

Actually, I don't have a problem with Mother's Day itself. It's a lovely holiday, a little Hallmarky, perhaps, but it was invented in 1908 by Anna Jarvis of Grafton, West Virginia in honor of her mother, while the Hallmark card company wasn't founded until 1910. Jarvis lobbied to make it an official national holiday and achieved this goal by 1914. Later, she became so disgusted with the commercialization of the holiday, especially the widespread purchasing of preprinted greeting cards, that she was arrested for disturbing the peace while leading a protest against Mother's Day in 1948. She died within the year. Coincidence? Perhaps not.

Yet, as I said, a lovely holiday. I went out to brunch with my children today (the only day a year I eat brunch), and then took my daughter to see a delightful production of Stargirl, a play adapted by Y York from a young adult novel by Jerry Spinelli (There was no mother onstage, but evidence of a supportive, loving mother in the title character's backstory). My daughter gave me a homemade card and a little book she wrote on why I am a wonderful mother (despite my frequent bouts of yelling, which she also cited). My son gave me a hug and a kiss (this, from an undemonstrative teenage boy, is riches indeed). All in all, a splendid day.

Medea and child

No, what I have a problem with is the assumption that all mothers are equally worth celebrating, all equally wonderful, nurturing, and just plain maternal. They aren't. Just go to the tabloids to get examples of many horrendous mothers. Horrible mothers have existed down through the ages: think Medea, think Lady Capulet, think Hansel and Gretel's mother (yes, it was their mother, not their stepmother. Look at the original 1812 version of the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmaerchen--she wasn't changed to their stepmother until the 1819 version), think Joan Crawford. Ugh, no, don't think Joan Crawford. There were and are plenty of terrible mothers in the world. But, as this is my blog, I think I should reveal that I'm specifically talking about my own mother.

Joan Crawford and children

My mother grew up in Japan during the beginning of the Showa Period. She was one of five siblings in a close-knit family. Her mother, my Obaa-san, was affectionate and warm, as far as I could tell from the few times I met her and from seeing her interactions with her other children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. I never knew from whence my mother's coldness and fury flowed, but what was certain was that she was almost never happy, almost always disappointed, enraged, or despondent. True, her adolescence was ruined by World War II, the Bomb, and the death of her beloved elder brother. Her career as a physicist never took off, and her subsequent career as a pioneering computer programmer never made her happy or fulfilled. My brother and I didn't turn out to be the children she wanted to have: brilliant, accomplished, celebrated. I believe she thought, like Leopold Mozart, that she could bully and berate us into becoming prodigies or geniuses. She was a Tiger Mother before the term existed.

My mother's own life hadn't turned out the way she wanted it to, which probably added to the hopes she placed on us, and thus to the sense of defeat she felt when she saw what we became. Not that we're criminals or layabouts or drug addicts or embezzlers: we're just slightly offbeat adults with somewhat dull lives. Seeing us must have been a harsh reminder of her failure, because she kept us at arm's length after we left home. In the last ten years or so of her life, before dementia hit, she tried to keep me and my brother away, with ever more far-fetched excuses. Not counting our visits to her deathbed, we each visited her precisely once after the births of our children. She was not interested in getting to know her grandchildren, or even in learning about their lives. We sent her packets of photographs of them, only to find them unopened in boxes after she died.

After she died, now over seven years ago, I found it easy to mourn the loss of a mother, but hard to mourn her specifically. Well-meaning people would come up to me and say, "Oh, losing your mother is the hardest thing in the world!" and I would nod politely and thank them for their kind thoughts while feeling like a fraud. Then came the time every year during the High Holy Days (yes, I'm Jewish--it's complicated) when I had to say a prayer for my mother during Yizkor services. For years, the prayer would stick in my throat. I did not want to follow my mother's example, or to say that I respected her, or to hope that her immortal soul would reside anywhere pleasant. So I was happy to find that the new edition of the High Holy Days machzor that we switched to a couple of years ago contained the following prayer:

Dear God, You know my heart. 

Indeed, You know me better than I know myself, so I turn to You before I rise for Kaddish. 

My emotions swirl as I say this prayer. The parent I remember was not kind to me. His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and of dismay that a parent could hurt a child as I was hurt. 

I do not want to pretend to love, or to grief that I do not feel, but I do want to do what is right as a Jew and as a child.

Help me, O God, to subdue my bitter emotions that do me no good, and to find that place in myself where happier memories may lie hidden, and where grief for all that could have been, all that should have been, may be calmed by forgiveness, or at least soothed by the passage of time. 

I pray that You, who raise up slaves to freedom, will liberate me from the oppression of my hurt and anger, and that You will lead me from this desert to Your holy place. 

—Robert Saks

This little prayer, printed in the margin of the page for memorializing a mother during the Yizkor service, made such a huge difference to me. It was as though a crushing weight had been lifted from my chest, and I could breathe freely again. It made me understand, truly understand, that there was not a one-size-fits-all mold for motherhood, that it was all right to feel angry, hurt, betrayed by the mother who had not known how to love her children.

I continue to celebrate Mother's Day, now with my own children. I love them deeply as they are, and would not wish them to be otherwise. I practice a style of motherhood I call "Reactive Parenting": whenever I am confronted with a problem involving discipline or childrearing, I ponder carefully what my mother would have done in the same situation and do exactly the opposite. It's not failsafe, but it seems to work ninety percent of the time.

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!

Second Childishness and Mere Oblivion

Well, it's looking as if I were a bit too ambitious with this whole "weekly ramblings" bit. It's more like bi-weekly ramblings, or twice-monthly ramblings. But I assure you, Unknown Reader, that I ramble on those weeks I don't post as well as on the ones I do!

Today I'm thinking of reasons to avoid visiting my father in assisted living. He suffers from mid- to late-stage dementia, which means he recognizes me and smiles when he sees me, but has no idea who I am. Conversations tend to be repetitive, with lots of explanations of ordinary concepts, like how to open a car door from the inside,  how to eat a sandwich (he tends to deconstruct them and eat them piece by piece, starting with the top slice of bread, moving on through the lettuce, tomato, and meat, then ending with the bottom slice), or how to zip a jacket. Most of his comments run along the lines of, "Oh, I remember this place! I've been here before!" or "I don't think I've ever seen this place before." Sometimes he'll utter both of these statements in quick succession.

It's not that I don't love my father. I do. He is the parent on whom I could depend for love and affection throughout my childhood. But this shell of a man is not my father. He's a dull, shambling, confused creature that inhabits my father's skin. Occasionally, flashes of my father's wit come through in a joke, a mannerism, a bit of wordplay. What an epic struggle it must be to make a pun when all language is slipping away!

It's been a week since I last visited him. For a while, I was visiting him three times a week, because if I didn't go that often, he would make a break for it, shouting, "This place is a prison!", heading out the front door of the residence with a purposeful stride, making a beeline for the woods surrounding the home. Now that I've moved him to a more secure unit closer to my house, he seems content to stay put. The attention paid him at the new residence, and the daily care lavished on him seem to have a soothing effect on him, and he's much less restless, more happy. Also, it could be that the dementia that's increasingly eroding his memories is also robbing him of his will.

The particular form of dementia that my father suffers from is called Lewy Body Dementia, and it is relatively rare, though the second-most common form of dementia after Alzheimer's. My mother had it, too, which means that the odds of my brother and I inheriting it are significantly higher than for others. So seeing my father is a sort of reminder of my probably eventual fate, a sort of senile memento mori. Yet another reason to find a thousand other things to do, rather than pay my father a visit.

Yet I go back, week after week, grudgingly, to spend time with him. I have given up trying to shake up his memory, because it distresses him now to realize how much he's forgotten, but I take him for walks in nature, so I can hear him exclaim "This is magnificent!" as we stop to watch a sunset or a creek tumbling over some rocks, or some deer emerging from the woods. That familiar phrase, more than anything else, brings my father back to me.

Oh, God, I hope you don't think I do that all the time!

Why do we spend so much of our lives embarrassed? This thought often comes to me, especially when I am apologizing for a particular like or dislike that has slipped out in the course of conversation. I catch a glimpse of a raised eyebrow, a dip of the corner of the mouth, a flaring of the nostrils in my interlocutor, and I mentally (or even physically) flush, and I rush to explain, to belittle, or to qualify what I've just said. Yes, even though I was writing my dissertation on "The Failure of Rebellion in Romantic Drama–England, France, and Germany" when I finally fled graduate school, never to return, I really, really loved reading the Harry Potter books. And even though I know the Arab Spring is a very important social and historical phenomenon, I just don't care.

Even as I type these statements, I cringe in self-denigration. No doubt you, Unknown Reader, are appalled by either my evident bad taste or my cynical apathy.

I seem at times to swim in seas of embarrassment. It is the bane of my existence. I blush, I stammer, I fall silent, I bite my words back. Why can't I revel in being myself? Where is my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world?

I am filled with admiration for people who don't care how they look or sound to others, who present themselves simply and straightforwardly, without apology. I think this was why I was first attracted to my ex-husband: his utter lack of self-consciousness whether he was serenading me in the middle of a restaurant, grabbing me around the waist and waltzing with me in a bookstore that just happened to be playing a waltz as background music, or wearing a kilt on the subway. While my face flamed and my eyes stayed downcast, he would blithely go about his singing or dancing or kilt-wearing and offer friendly smiles to those who mocked him. If only I had that kind of confidence and self-possession! I thought. Then....

Then what? I don't know. Life would be easier? Surely not. It wasn't for my ex-husband. But wouldn't it be heaven, though, to be be liberated from all that humiliation? I think it must be at least a tiny bit wonderful.

I watch my son and daughter, who are extremely self-conscious and easily embarrassed, and I wonder if my own constant embarrassment has had an effect on them. I never mock them or belittle their likes and dislikes (okay, maybe I did a little when my daughter was going through a very brief Justin Bieber phase), but somehow all that embarrassment oozes down to them anyway. Am I inadvertently teaching them shame by example? Who am I kidding? Peer pressure alone can crush a child more completely than anything a mere parent can dish out.

Which brings me to the next question: Why do we (not my family, but society as a whole) feel compelled to mock others? I think in most cases it's because it makes us feel superior, to mark us as beings of good taste, high intellect, or, at least, decent fashion sense. This last brings back memories of humiliation.

For a teenager in the 70's growing up in the Midwest, it was considered the height of poor fashion to wear jeans that showed even a bit of ankle. In fact, jeans were supposed to cover most of the top of one's shoe, and to drag behind so much that eventually the friction of one's heels would wear off a crescent of fabric in the back. My mother, being a practical woman, always bought me jeans that were well off the ground, so I walked the halls of my junior high school to near-constant ridicule from both girls and boys (this was pre-Michael Jackson, remember). As waves of scarlet passed fitfully across my face with every comment, I would rage inwardly, wondering why they cared so much about a couple inches of denim. In the entire scheme of the universe, or even of planet Earth, why did it matter?

Then there was Dale Devore. He was skinny, red-headed, freckled, and always had at least two inches of white sock showing above his sneakers. But he was cheerful and funny and never seemed to mind anything. One day, I was walking along behind him as the halls filled with students changing classes, and a big jock-type fellow remarked loudly to him, "I see you're waiting for the Flood" (this was a common remark, and pants like ours were dubbed "highwaters"). His friends guffawed. Without missing a beat, Dale retorted, "Yep, and I'm gonna be ready for it, and you're all gonna get your pants wet!" The burly guy muttered something along the lines of "Loser!" or "You're such an asshole!" but all the steam had gone out of him; it was no longer fun teasing the weird kid. I think I fell in love with Dale at that moment.

(Later on, in high school, Dale was a DJ for our high school radio, which broadcast once a week for fifteen minutes. He got suspended once for locking the door to the broadcast station and blasting rock-and-roll for five minutes during first period. I wonder if he ever fulfilled his dream of becoming a real DJ. Where are you now, Dale?)

So one of my goals for the Second Half is to give up embarrassment, sort of like giving up smoking. It will be hard to do at first, and I'm sure I'll have many relapses, but I'll work on it a little every day. I want to revel in my geekiness, not to apologize for my tastes, such as liking songs by both Lady Gaga and John Denver, and to recognize that people who might ridicule me have a problem with their own self-esteem. Oh God, that sounds so pompous! I'm not really like that....