As a child, I would put off doing chores until I would get spanked. I would put off bathing so I could play. If I had songs to sing at church, I would put off learning the words until the night before and then cram them in my juvenile noggin. Same with high school. Essays and reports were always done the day before or the day they were due.
You would think that as an adult, I would stop torturing myself and get things done in a timely manner so that I don't have to worry about it at some point every day until the dead line.
I also married a procrastinator. The two of us together are a force to be reckoned with. He's more gracious than I am. If I wait till the last moment, he sweetly goes about his business or picks up the slack without a word. If he procrastinates and it makes me have to rush, I'm quick to point out how much easier our life would be if HE would quit procrastinating.
I think today may have been a lesson for both of us. This year for Christmas, our family decided that we would all exchange homemade gifts. Clearly, this was a bonus for us because we both love art and creating things! Except....we put it off for a month and realized that we were going to have to bust our butts to finish everything.
Today was spent feeling like we were in the slave labor trade. We were up to our eyeballs in clay and tools. At one point, Kendrick accidentally moved a piece he was working on and it shifted. The look on his face was one of sheer insanity. He snapped a little bit. And by a little, I mean he started swearing and got up from the table looking like he was trying to find something to kick. I had to talk him back from the ledge by assuring him I could fix it, just as soon as I was done completing the million things in front of me. He put his head in his hands and just sat there. No one was hurt, but I'm pretty sure I could hear his heart beating from across the table.
We put on Christmas music to give us some cheerful background noise and distract us from the tasks we were working on. For some reason, Pandora Radio decided that they needed to play every Mariah Carey Christmas song that she's done.....repeatedly. Her range of vocals is impressive, but when she started sounding like a dolphin, it made me think about hurting someone. I realized I was at my breaking point after the fifth time it had come on. I looked at Kendrick and said, "If I have to listen to anymore of this, I'm going to flip the table and cancel Christmas." His snappy retort was, "well I can't sit here in silence!" At this point, we knew we were both getting a little punchy and the situation was becoming dire. We decided on a Christmas movie and got back to work.
Our nimble little hands were sore. Our backs hurt from sitting at the table. I feared I would get a blood clot in my leg from the sheer amount of time we were sitting and kept getting up to shake it off. My hair looked like an afro from the amount of times I had run my hands through it in frustration. Kendrick's eyes were bloodshot and shifty.
Twenty six hours later, (no lie, it was literally that long. Give or take a few minutes) we peeled our achy, cracking bones up from the table and high fived each other. I think I felt a rib break, Kendrick coughed like he had consumption... but we were done. We.were.done.
We would have celebrated it, but neither of us could get out much more than a few curse words and groans.
There is a lesson to be learned here, but I think I will wait till later to figure it out.
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