The mini van halen smells terrible.
It could be rotting food, or moldy towels, or just stinky little boy feet. Whatever the source it is gross.
I don’t have the energy to ferret it out, and my inner child/parenting on track training doesn’t want me to. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. Those kids of mine should fix it.
Its when the shall turns to should that I know I am in the shit.
The goal, the forever ever I might be inching closer but I’m not quite sure goal, is to believe in the competence of everyone around me. Particularly my family and myself. Its a self fulfilling prophecy. My faith leads to incredible capability. My doubt…tears it down.
The “should” comes from a place of doubt and judgment. And self pity. Woe is me, with the smelly van. Those kids are always working against me. Yesterday coming out of the car they carried the groceries. And put most of them away without a single prompt. I appreciate and notice that, but not as much as the milk on the island. And once the delicate balance of counter cleanliness has tipped towards chaos I join in. Tea mug left, dwell magazine right. Eh, the milk was already there, my stuff can join theirs.
So maybe I am an inner slob, and I will take the tiniest bit of disorder and strew things around it. And maybe they spend more of their life as elements of entropy, and less in the endless cycle of returning things to their proper place.
Faith is hard. Believing in competence is hard. People suck at so many things. Maybe those people’s parents didn’t believe in them. Maybe they were met with the attitude that “I know you will screw it up anyway, so I’ll just do it myself.”
I am a starter. I start many things. I maintain fewer things. Housework is maintenance. Getting and staying fit are maintenance. For a while I had faith that my great great capacity was for starting things, and that I was quite capable of maintaining them. I would often choose to start the next thing before I had maintained the last thing for very long…I saw that as a choosing of the next thing, rather than a dropping out of the first thing. Teaching for other teaching, restaurant for teaching, non profit work for restaurant…it is about then the story began to change. My faith in myself and my competence drooped.
I’m ready to go back to my old story. Fake it till I make it. I have kids who carry things in from the van. I shall carry my next project further than my last. Perhaps even all the way to completion. Faith takes practice, like everything else.
It sometimes just smells bad along the way.
Nice. Honest (as usual). Now, just how to get the same satisfaction/rush out of maintenance that you get out of starting things?
I’m wondering if Parenting on Track discourages comments like ‘I wonder why my van stinks? ‘ Are you allowed to direct their attention to something?
That is just nagging wrapped in a question. Although like most things it is your emotional state that dictates the outcome. If I am matter of fact. This van smells terrible…they are more likely to giggle and bring stuff inside. If I am agitated they will get defensive. It’s the old carrot/stick thing. The big goal is to really shift my thinking from the immediacy of the van to the bigger picture of our relationship. It’s tricky stuff.
But you’re not alone. Nobody is everything so it’s a matter of finding your complementary parts, and maybe then you even learn a little from them and add to your own pile of parts. Work in progress. Faith. Call it what you will, none of us is complete without a bunch of others of us. And that’s okay.
Village and all.
Faking it is the strategy of the bold + daring. We do, then we become. I believe there are actually neuroscience studies about this: how walking tall actually affects your mindset, etc.
To be clear though: you’re not faking the big stuff. And that matters too.
Yes, smiling makes us happy 🙂