30 March 2009

new tricks

As of Wednesday I will be able to say, for better or for worse, "This month I turn 30."

The number of my age doesn't mean so much to me as the meaning. I feel that by the age of 30 certain habits and irresponsible tendencies of my 20s should be put behind me, at least to the best of my abilities.

Case in point, I will admit, and people who know me well will testify to this, that I am forgetful. I have doublebooked myself for events, forgotten I was supposed to meet friends for coffee, forgotten birthdays, etc. I figured this was a bad trait that I would work on to improve and I thought I was doing, not excellent, but okay. I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Example: as a mother of a child in our church's nursery, I was put on the nursery list. Last Sunday I looked at our bulletin and noticed I was on for babysitting in the afternoon. On the way home I repeated to myself: Babysitting next Sunday afternoon, babysitting next Sunday afternoon... Saturday night Anneka in the throes of teething pain kept us up for two hours during the night. I knew it was okay for me to stay home during the morning service my babysitting services weren't required until the afternoon service. Boy, I was sure proud of myself for remembering! So we get to church and I walk Anneka to the nursery and two people are already there. We don't have a lot of babies/toddlers in our church. I think you can see where I'm going with this. It turns out last week I read the bulletin wrong. It turns out I was on the list for babysitting in the morning. Hmm...

For awhile I did feel like a total dweeb for remembering the wrong details. I was so proud of myself and put such effort into trying to remember and to have it fall flat was extremely disappointing. Only in chick lit books like The Shopaholic are traits like scatterbrainedness portrayed as cute and endearing. In reality they come across as irresponsible, especially in someone like a mother who is supposed to be ultra-organised.


They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I disagree. At almost 30 I don't consider myself old and I'm still learning organisational skills. For me, this was a giant leap... at least I remembered that I had to babysit at all. The next step will be getting the time right.

1 comment:

sharon said...

Ah, organization: a skill we can learn. I've been working on this same on for all of my 20's and yet, it eludes me. Maybe by the time we hit our 40's - hahah!