Late

It's almost midnight.  Not quite; according to my cable box I have another 11 minutes to squeak out a post without officially being late - two weeks in a row - for my Tuesday-post-day.  But still, it's late. 

I hate being late.

I grew up with a mother blessed with enormous gifts.  She's smart, she's self-confident, she has been able to reinvent herself as needed to grow and adjust to the world around her.  She has walked naked on Gay Head Beach - we watched JFK, Jr.'s plane start to wash ashore that day - and has celebrated Mother's Day with all three daughters in Paris.  She's doing well.

But she's late.  She's always late.  She has a mindset such that, if she needs to be somewhere by 3:00, she'll start putting her shoes on at 3:00.  "A five-minute trip to the store" is my mother's secret code for, "I'll see you in two hours." 

I'm not quite sure what it is, and this is not for lack of trying to pinpoint it.  She's intelligent.  She wears a watch.  She knows how to plan ahead.  And yet, she'll be ten minutes late to the movie, four hours late to a birthday party.  She almost missed my daughter's birth - I called her the moment I went into labor, because she was at least 7 hours away at the time, and she rushed into the delivery room at 11:25 p.m.  Emily was born ten minutes later.  It's a combination of leaving late, dawdling comfortably, and not quite being able to accurately estimate just how long any given activity will take.  Plus something undefinable and special which is my mother.

As a child, this was a way of life.  It was understood.  I didn't even know that movies in theaters had previews until I was old enough to date.  I brought a book every single place we ever went, even if it was allegedly going to be a run to the video store, because you just never knew.   I swear to you that when I got my learner's permit and sat in the driver's seat for the first time, I did not know how to drive from my house to, well, anywhere.  I'd trained myself to bury my nose in a book the moment the seat belt clicked in, and I had no concept of my hometown geography. 

Once I reached college, and was suddenly on my own with the transportation and the scheduling and the getting-to-places-on-time, I was completely out of my league.  I would stare, baffled, as my roommates prepared to leave the dorms at 8:45 for a 9:00 class; I still hadn't showered yet.  But slowly, over time, with much practice, I realized that I could be on time for things.  I could even - dare I say it? - be early.  Amazing.

My then-boyfriend, now-husband, is punctual to a fault.  I could deal with an exasperated sigh and unsubtle eyeroll, or I could step it up a notch and skip that whole hurried-and-frazzled feeling. 

Quite the epiphany, that - learning that it was possible to live life without constantly apologizing or feeling rushed.  It's become almost habit by now, certainly to the point where I have to take a deep breath - or five - when I've made plans with my mother and have to readjust the day because somehow she got on the road two hours later than expected.  And she looks at me with a vaguely indulgent nod, unsure how it is that a daughter of hers developed such a reliance on schedules and plans.  Mind you, I'm not inflexible, and I don't even own a watch, but I've found a comfortable niche in which I have an idea of what to expect out of my time, and that niche isn't even in the same cave as my mother's let's-just-wing-it mindset.

So, just lately, between work stress and husband-in-grad-school stress and children stress, I've found myself feeling late again.  Sometimes it's because I've forgotten I was supposed to be somewhere, other times I've misjudged the December rush hour traffic... who knows?  I'm trying to get back to a mental space where I feel like I have some control over my own minutes, in which I don't spend some part of every day mentally rehearsing the inevitable apology because, once again, time got away from me.

Speaking of which, I'm now seven minutes late to post.  An improvement over last week, to be sure, but not quite there yet.  I'm sorry, I just got so wrapped up in my next-to-last remaining Christmas knitting project that the evening somehow melted away.  I'll try to do better next time.  Sorry...

Comments

[Sarah at In the Trenches]

I'm one of those "on time" people. Hubby, on the other hand, says "On time means you're late." So we're the bunch that shows up 10 min ahead of schedule and look like dorks.
Yep, that's us.

[Mrs. Chicky]

Being late happens. I should know - my family plans on me being at least 30 minutes late for every function. Now that I have a toddler I'm even worse! But us tardy people do try, occasionally, to be on time. We often fail, but we try.

[Alex Elliot]

I'm one of those people that always has to be everywhere early. I have to say that I find it stressful. I bet your mom is very laid back and probably really enjoys getting to and from events.

[sandyshoes]

Sometimes I'm late. It happens. Sometimes it matters; usually it doesn't.

But people who are always late, the way you describe your mother being, make me angry. There's something deliberately clueless, so fundamentally selfish about it... like there's no need to respect anyone else's time. That's just rude.