⏱️ Adulting, Continued: Time (Un)Management
Read the first two posts in this series: Adulting is Easy! (Just follow this 100-step daily checklist) and TMI (when The Responsible Route™ fails—or it fails you).
“Since life is scary and precarious, controlling people I love felt like the responsible thing to do.
In addition to the fear factor, there is something else that leads me to want to control things, and that is my belief that I am very smart and creative. I really do believe I have very good ideas and that people would do best if they got on board. This kind of control is called leadership.”
—Glennon Doyle, “seconds” chapter in Untamed
On Sunday, an art-world VIP—and wonderful person we hope to get to know beyond any professional connections—asked Michael if he would like to be a personal guest for her tour at The Guggenheim. He joyfully said yes.
Enter stage left: my time-(over)management monster. Knowing he’s a night-owl, before heading to bed, I asked, “Did you set an alarm for tomorrow?”
If I’m being generous, maybe I did this because for almost ten years (nine of them living together), we have been learning about his ADHD and what systems ease what researchers call time blindness. Maybe I did it because I grew up following my dad’s mantra, “If you’re on time, you’re late,” noticing how showing up early to meetings was a sign of great respect—how good it felt to see him waiting outside of his car, casually reading the newspaper, whenever I’d step out of the front door to meet up with him.1 Maybe it was because I remember dreading the occasional days when I was the last kid picked up from school, or equally, the way I viscerally hate the feeling of being late.
“Yes,” he said. “Already did.”
The first thing I did when I woke up: wonder what time he set the alarm for. I calculated the distance to The Guggenheim and determined that, to be safe, he would need to leave the house at 10:15 to get there by 11 a.m.
There’s a joke about taking the subway in New York City: if you leave the house five minutes early, you’ll arrive at your destination thirty minutes early. If you leave five minutes late, you’ll arrive thirty minutes late.
When Michael came downstairs after his morning stack of meditation and morning pages, I checked the time: 9:50. He didn’t seem rushed. Except that he needed to leave soon!
“What time are you leaving the house?” I asked, faux-innocently, while starting the second pot of coffee.
“Just let me manage it, I’ve got it,” he replied. He was already onto me. He knew my timeliness obsession had kicked in, that it was already revving into overdrive. I swallowed a lump of anxiety. But what if he’s late?!
At 9:55, he started a twenty-minute Pilates class on the living room TV, something essential for his lower back so he could walk around the museum without pain. But twenty minutes?! It would end when it was time to leave! He won’t have time to get dressed!
I joined him for the class, cycling through as many micro-anxiety circuits as there were reps in The Hundreds. I kept biting my tongue through every next set of moves, trying to honor his request, but whooo-wee was that hard for me! During one side series, I told myself, Listen—stop micro-managing him! Let him be!
After flipping to the other side, I mentally reached for an Al-Anon/CoDA refrain: Your help isn’t helping. Next, I started assuming he would be late without the gift of my unceasing time micro-management: If he’s late, so be it! Let him experience his own consequences. If he’s late and embarrassed by that, he’ll learn for next time. (LOL, like I’m not married to a 40-year-old man who attended Catholic school for thirteen years with nuns so strict they slapped his hands with rulers for even the smallest infractions).
Knowing I couldn’t say anything, I started playing out worst-case timing scenarios in my head. So he’s late, and he holds up the whole tour. It’s not the end of the world. After all, the tour guide is Lebanese, and Lebbos are famous for being fashionably (by a horrifying hour or two) late. It’s a cultural difference. Let’s say you make an appointment with a plumber in Lebanon and at the appointed time, they still have not arrived. Twenty minutes later, you call them: Where are you? “I’m on my way, almost there,” they’ll reply—even when they haven’t yet left the house.
With five minutes of the Pilates class remaining, I started wondering: Why isn’t he checking his phone to note the time?! Where is his phone?! Is it charged?
Once the class ended, I continued sweating on the inside, suppressing my still-intense urge to control his timing. I failed. “How are you getting there, by bus or train?” I asked. Damnit, I had come so close to honoring his request. Me now to my Monday morning self: WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?!
“The 4/5,” he said patiently, knowing I had stepped onto his side of the time street (again) even though he asked me not to. Phew. Maybe he’d juuuust get there on time, if there were no train delays . . .
He left the house at 10:27. Que sera, sera! I reassured my inner time-(over)keeper.
Michael arrived at 11 a.m. on the dot. Later that morning, I checked our group text: the host had written saying there was traffic and she would be seven minutes late.
So, in the end, lo and behold, he was the first one there, waiting casually for the group, not the other way around. See! I said to myself. MY HELP ISN’T HELPING! It’s annoying! And besides, it all worked out! And so what if it hadn’t?!?! This isn’t brain surgery!
If this is what I’m doing to Michael—and he has the ability to kindly ask me to stop—imagine what I’m doing to myself all. damn. day. Imagine all the ways I’m pushing the river of time—and timing—in my own life.2
Two days prior to the museum visit, someone shared a piece of wisdom with me: “God is seldom early, but never late.”
And so, after smirking at the divine timing within the text thread, way smarter than my small strategies, I remembered, a-freaking-gain, not to micro-manage the timing of transition and transformation.
Yesterday, when I asked Michael if I could write about this, mostly about how hard it was for me to manage my over-functioning,3 he said sure; adding, “By the way, I’m never late to important meetings. Only when it’s casual and it doesn’t really matter.”
“And just so you know,” he said, “she ended up being fifteen minutes late.”4
❤️
Continue reading the next post in this series . . .
🍝 Once, on a second date, my suitor and I bumped into each other walking laps in a small West Village garden just around the corner from our restaurant meeting place, both of us fifteen minutes early.
—Yes, that’s four em-dashes in one paragraph. #SorryNotSorry!
🐆 From later in the same Untamed chapter as the opening epigraph, Glennon recounts the following exchange with her sister, Amanda, after her wife Abby gently requested (like Michael), “I see what you’re doing there, babe. I love you for the effort, but no thank you, I’m good.”
ME [TO SISTER]: Okay, I hear you, but what if I actually know my idea is better for her than her idea is for her? Should I just pretend to think her idea is good? Should I just smile and let her try her idea so we can get to mine when hers doesn’t work so well? How long will I have to carry on with this time-wasting charade?
SISTER: My God. Okay. If that’s how you have to think of it, Glennon, then yes, try that. Try to fake it till you make it.
😂
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Love the “em-dash per paragraph” metric. You know we’re watching. 👀
“God is seldom early, but never late.” Of course!
But also ... God doesn't give a shit about time. Probably laughing at our obsession with it.
Love this. I used to have a very close relationship with time. Tracking time for every minute of work I did ... you know, for the data. A habit that I brought with me from my consulting days.
The day I stopped, I wondered if I'd be LESS productive. Nope. Turns out my obsession with time wasn't helping. And only stressed me out.
These days, I'm bending time 😂
You've probably felt a sense of timelessness when writing ... THAT's the mood I'm going for ... but all day. It's a WIP ;)