Once in a blue moon, I’ll actually grow hopeful that my wife has finally shaken free from the shackles of her obsession. But her newfound freedom never lasts. Secretly, she’ll start planning meals for the week, color coding and syncing calendars, and getting a little twitchy whenever I suggest that we just enjoy life and go with the flow. Before long, she will once again be Captain Ahab at the helm, hunting for the illusive white whale or, in her case, the illusive routine.
“If only we could get a routine,” I’ve heard her say a thousand times.
From stories I’ve heard of old, routines did once exist. Now, most grizzled millennial parents seem to believe that routines, if not already extinct, are on the verge of extinction in our modern era. Ours is an era of endless options, when stores never close, when youth sports have no offseason, when work (through conduit of the internet) sneaks into our homes and intrudes on domestic downtime, when everything (through the conduit of the internet) vies for our attention, our time, and mostly our money. When no boundaries exist to protect our space or contain our movements, it’s no wonder that we’re “all running around,” my wife says, “like free-range chickens with our heads cut off.” She has never been a fan of free-range living.
Admittedly, she is the chief fence builder for our lives. I have always hated building fences, both literally and figuratively, and generally recoil from the task, much like a spinning jenny recoils when I accidentally let a high tensile wire slip and spring back to form a bird’s nest tangle fit for a pterodactyl. My wife, however, has some natural aptitude toward figurative fence building, for planning and organizing and scheduling (yuck, I recoil at even typing the word). To build a routine, you have to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same order, day after day, which sounds really boring to me and really wonderful to her.
To achieve such a boring pattern, you use things like alarms, calendars, and planners–all tools of the devil. Do you think Adam and Eve set an alarm clock in the Garden of Eden? Do you think Thoreau scheduled out his days on the banks of Walden Pond? Do you think Jimmy Buffett color coded his calendar in Margaritaville? No, he didn’t even color code his wardrobe. He just picked a parrot shirt and went to the bar.
The point here is my wife has a problem, namely her obsession to stamp out disorder in a disorderly world. Please put her on your prayer list.
Clever title. . .I use red on our calendar for important information like tick bites and fevers or change in medication. Pink is for fun activities. Purple is doctor appointments. Green is for Steven work related. Blue is other appointments. . .it’s a simple system that Steven can’t seem to grasp and he just uses boring black on my carefully planned calendar. Hmm. . .maybe I need those prayers, too. (I feel your wife’s frustration)
That’s funny. At work, I eventually got banned from adding events to the office white board calendar because I didn’t adhere to the color coded marker system and no one could read my scribble.
Don’t you see, it’s not about the calendars and clocks, it’s all about the uniform! If you fill your wife’s closet with parrot shirts and discard all other shirts so she is forced to wear them, her identity will shift with the shirt. Really, try it! 😊
That is a good idea. I think I will start sneaking in a new piece of parrot attire into her closet every day, kind of like boiling a frog in parrot shirts.
My husband believes i have a problem like that as well. 😉
Good to know–we will put you on the prayer list as well.