I got really angry today. Really, really angry. I was like a big ball of rage that was ready to blow up all over everybody, and I basically had to send myself to my room and hyperventilate to keep from strangling someone. Why?
Valentine’s cards.
The kids’ school requires them to make all of their own Valentine’s Day cards. This sounds really nice and homey and au naturale until you start making 30-plus little cards. Or book markers. Or whatever fabulous idea your kid comes up with. It also sounds really nice until you realize the project falls right in the middle of doing their science fair experiment. Which only takes 150 hours or so.
I’ve been bugging, lecturing, and annoying the kids for days about all of their deadlines. I’ve done visual presentations with the calendar in an attempt to show them the breakdown of days until the Valentines and science projects are due. The 6-year-old, Elfie, is on it. She’s a planner and a list checker-offer. The 8-year-old, Newt, is. . . an artist. There’s not a nicer way to put it. He’s a god damned, freaking artist.
Newt has a “vision” for his projects. He doesn’t necessarily like to share said vision. And like most artists I know, his vision changes. And also, like most artists I know, he has absolutely no sense of time.
So today, when we finally needed to pull together his extremely ambitious, comic book Valentine on which he’s been spending way too much time (and absolutely no time on his science project, which will also become a vision and cause me to become an angry ball of rage), he freaked out on me because I told him he needed to stop drawing and put the thing together. You would’ve thought I’d just told George Lucas he wouldn’t be able to make Return of the Jedi. The arc was ruined. The title page would make no sense. The project was in total disarray.
We managed to find a remedy to the problem. But I explained to Newt that this was why I’d asked him over and over to get this done before today. And that’s when he really freaked out. His hands clenched. His face tightened. He looked like he was going to explode. It took my husband coming over and empathizing with him — explaining to him that he was the exact same way when it came to not being organized and going off in too many directions. They really are two peas in a pod: my men of “great ideas.”
After Newt pulled his book together, he, Elfie, and I got into the car and went to make copies. No biggie. Yep. No biggie. Except the copy place was closed. And my iPhone wasn’t cooperating. So we had to drive to a much farther store (Did I mention I’ve been feeling like crap lately — with the ice pick through my ear problem that I get? So I don’t have a high tolerance for. . . anything?). And when we got there, it turns out my overly ambitious son’s book — which is twenty-five pages long — cost sixty dollars to print. Six zero. Sixty. For Valentines. That you make yourself.
By this time, it was about 5:30 at night, so my choices were a) print the book, or b) come up with a new idea, go buy supplies, and have him make 32 other Valentines in the next two-and-a-half hours.
As we drove home, my hands clenched around the steering wheel. My face tightened. And I’m pretty sure I looked like I was going to explode. It took my husband sitting next to me, up in our room, empathizing with me as I ranted about procrastinating children, homemade Valentines, and my intense disdain for science projects. Then I had to lie down on my bed with the door closed for about an hour.
I’m thinking, if Newt’s a crazy artist, he most definitely got the “crazy” part from me.
Tammy Soong is a writer, wife, and mom from Reno, Nevada. She takes an absurd amount of pain medication, but not enough to have actually named her children "Newt" and "Elfie." She spends most days stressing out over clutter, writing stuff for this place, and working on podcasts with her gal pals, the Blogging Betties.