The Project Never Done

Paula wrote about her procrastination phobia and its origins in a traumatic misadventure incorporating glue, paper, a lift-top schooldesk, and hordes of fiercely judgmental nine-year-olds. Flashbacks assaulted me as I read this, the trigger words not unlikely being “phobia” and “incident”. I shudder as I type.

Kindergarten was at a school whose very name invoked fearful visions of headless horsemen. Even today Sleepy Hollow School is mostly surrounded by the wild frontier at the edge of suburbia – a trackless waste of oak trees and sourgrass and untamed squirrels. The playground hung over the edge of this wilderness and frightful stories were told of rattlesnakes and black widow spiders. Sometimes we would just play indoors by the cubbyholes, safely pretending to be Presidents. We only played the Presidents anybody had heard of: Kennedy, Lincoln, Washington. Kennedy was killed that year, but our world was too innocent, too closely protected, for us to know.

Late one warm spring day I was dutifully performing my tasks when the teacher called me to account on a project about my home. At home, I was supposed to create a montage representing the place I lived. Colored drawings, cutouts, magazine clippings cleverly arranged – these were the materials of informative art. The result was to be a collage, indeed a graphic essay, describing the place I lived. She hadn’t seen it. I told her I had done it. She said I had not. I burst into tears.

I was quite the inconsolable child in those days. I vaguely remember my mother getting involved. Even though she was a newly single mother going to school so that she could get a job, I have a vision of her being at the school to discuss this serious breach of responsibility with my accuser. I say vision, not memory; I am more than half convinced the vision is false, invented in my child’s brain to show what should have happened. Most likely, alone in bitter silence, I built stories of what should have happened. Mommy should have shown the teacher that I did it and turned it in. Mommy should have made sure I turned it in. Mommy should have made sure I did it. Mommy should have known about it and reminded me to do it. Mommy should have, should have, should have … My mother figured prominently in all of this, but in all likelihood she never knew about it; and was transformed, quite without her knowledge, into yet another untrustworthy authority figure.

Kindergarten ended, as Kindergarten must, and the days hazed into summertime trike rides and running the garden hose and the long hot slide into First Grade. There was no discernible consequence to my failure to do the great year-end project. The adults decided it was just something little Don couldn’t do. No need to punish him for it – let him move on – his unfolding life will smite him well enough. I invented these lessons and inculcated them and in time came to regard requirements as fungible, deadlines as arbitrary, and authorities as unreliable. Subsequent experiences were unable to break the lock these concepts had on my outlook. Grade school, high school, collegiate and even career tracks were weighted down by the knowledge that I had not done my homework, had not met requirements, and did not fully deserve the credit given. You might claim that these feelings should have moved me to do more, not less; should have motivated me like that hanging cat picture and not demotivated me like some poster featuring Charlie Sheen. But the youthful human mind is not so predictably programmed. Sometimes the dark tales we spin tell us not what to fear and avoid … but what we will become.