‘Delaying children not only make me impatient, but also just angry’

Of course I do not want to bombard myself as a scientist, but I think I have shown conclusively that lingering is a trait that is not genetically determined. Not only am I not a dawdler, I even have a pronounced allergy to slowness, strolling and slow motion.

Dawdling

My kids do have the gene. The lingering. It is active throughout the day, but culminates in the morning, just before school starts. Then the gene leads to the fact that putting on a sock takes five minutes, a shoe double and draining a bowl of yogurt is a project of at least twenty minutes. Time that is not there, as I do not feel like ringing the alarm before 6:30 am.

And so it is that we run to school most days, while I shout military encouragements like, “Guys, just walk on, we’re getting too late!” Somewhere in my head there is a little voice that says: “Look, this is Mariëtte, as the pleasant mother she would become.” But that lingering does something to me. A bit of a red rag versus bull situation. Not only do I get impatient, I get angry all the way to screaming. Just can’t watch that foot that dangles half a sock after three minutes.

The owner of the foot has long since been distracted by building a Lego castle and then I always shout: “Come here, I’ll do it!” (The sock, not the Lego.) Nora prefers to run her affairs herself and then stoically continues to dress in slow motion, but Casper is more than happy to accept such help.

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Let it run in the soup

Someone said, you just have to let it go. So go to school on time, but in the state they are in at that moment. If that is with one shoe, then it is. But I think that is crazy. “Hello teacher, yes sorry that they are wearing socks, but we are in a learning process for a while.”

Besides, my kids would think it was a hilarious experiment and would slow it down even further so that they could go to school in their underpants. Then I’d rather prefer my military encouragement and the risk of having to help my son put on his socks until he is 24. Maybe by then I’ll have grown a dawdling gene on my own.

This column can be found in Kek Mama 14-2020.

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