by Jenny Gardiner
I know you all know about the Wimpy Burger. Because we are all old enough to remember Popeye, right? Back when we were kids, there was nothing else on television but that lame-o cartoon several time a week (and of course Leave it To Beaver, but that's a story for another day). So for lack of anything better to do, we kicked back in front of the TV console (remember those consoles?!) and watched Popeye pouring on the spinach, Brutus forcing himself on Olive Oyl (talk about a wife-beater type), and Wimpy always in search of the elusive burger, for which he had no cash.
Wimpy's famous line, of course, was "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."
I have come to recite this line with regularity, sotto voce, around my teenaged son, who loves to "rob Peter to pay Paul" in order to borrow time. In other words, he's a Grand Master Procrastinator, and it's making me nuts.
You know the cliched line about Little Kids, Little Problems, Big Kids, Big Problems? Well, it's true. To a certain extent. Granted, your very small child can indeed get into all sorts of vexing, and even deadly trouble. Like swallowing something out of those bottles with the Mr. Yuk stickers would constitute Big Problem for Little Kids.
But generally speaking, once they get bigger, you can be assured of mental stresses that will add fat to your ass and gray to your head faster than you can say "My kid didn't do that!"
That is, of course, if you are a stress-eater (which I am), and inclined to sprout gray hairs under duress with the rapidity of a tender bean pod unfurling on a time-lapse video (ditto). [By the way, if something happens to my hairdresser, I sure as hell hope they can unearth his wonderful recipe for my bogus blond hair color or I'm screwed.]
Okay, so I'm beating around the bush. But here's my Big Kid issue. And really, it started out as a Little Kid issue, but we failed, failed, failed to quash it in its infancy, and so it has become a problem that has grown and spread like that bright yellow fungus that shows up magically in your mulch after a heavy rain.
It's all about teen boys and procrastination. Oy, vey.
Now, I know that there must be those boys who are punctual and get their homework done on time and go to bed before 1 a.m. and when they're supposed to be home at 11:30 they're home at 11:30 and not 12:10 with every legitimate-sounding excuse in the book as to why they're not there on time. But I haven't ever experienced that myself. And it makes me CRAZY.
I think the thing of it is that my son is such a fabulous kid in every way (except the procrastination, which, admittedly, bleeds into every aspect of our lives) that I have excused away this bad habit to the point that it's now a firmly-entrenched personality trait that constantly comes back to bite not only him in the butt, but us as well. I have been his procrastination enabler, feeding the addiction instead of stopping it early and often.
And I wonder often: is the procrastination of a 17-year old a trait that will never recede? Much like a 15-year old nail biter, really unlikely to ever cease that obsessive habit. Or, say, a 45-year old stress-eater who blithely pops peanut M&Ms when anxiety hits the flash point.
This all came to a head this week when college admissions letters came out. And to our great dismay, our intellectually curious teenaged son, with a passion for learning and smarts to spare and who truly deserved admission into most of the colleges to which he applied found himself wait-listed for his top choices (this of course hastened by the fact that this of all years is officially the hardest year to get into college, thanks to the Type-A overachieving Baby Boomer parents, whose children have all reached matriculation peak this year). And these wait-lists? A direct result of years of Wimpy Burger behavior that sadly cancelled out SO many of the hugely important and relevant things he's done over the years, because when it came time to crunch for that AP Calculus exam, he was too engrossed in debating other political buffs on some website where you create and sustain your own nation-state to bother with integers or whatever it is you learn in Calculus. A really well-meaning kid whose track record was exemplary in so many areas, but who just couldn't help but reaching for that Wimpy Burger time and again when he should've been focusing on those irrelevant classes that ultimately mean nothing down the road, because really, who actually uses Calculus anyhow?
On one level my heart aches for him that he couldn't squelch the Wimpy Burger in himself, couldn't see far enough down the road to realize that even if he would rather spend hours on the computer debating world events, the fact is you have to play the high school game if you want to get past it and ultimately into the area in which you have a passion. You can't keep blowing off the have-to's to deal with the want-to's, even if the want-to's really matter. The have-to's are sort of the tolls on the highway toward your dreams, and you can't jump the tollbooth---eventually it catches up with you.
Our philosophy all along has been that our kids need to learn to sink or swim on their own. We refuse to be helicopter parents, hand-holding and hovering and ensuring every step they take is the right step. And so it's been agonizing for us to watch this unfold, to watch his dreams now have to re-shape to fit this new reality, a reality that exists because of those damned Wimpy Burgers. You can be sure I am left to question whether we should have, could have, done something to stop the Wimpy Burger behavior from getting beyond him. And to hope that perhaps this time the lesson will take hold (but most likely won't)...)
The irony has not escaped me that a wait list for college admission is almost a Wimpy Burger sort of thing in and of itself. "I'll gladly accept you Tuesday, that is, unless I can't find an opening for you, er, um..."
Am I the only mom with a perpetually procrastinating boy? Or is this the rule, rather than the exception?
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