Leveling Up
Photos/Rachel Maxwell.
By Melissa Bowles-Terry
My usual measures of productivity, along with my work routine and social life, screeched to a halt in March. For the first couple of weeks at home, I made to-do lists on a whiteboard for my 7-year-old daughter. And then I took pictures of them, I guess to document the whole experience. Back on March 24 (Day 9) I wrote:
Breakfast
Make bed
Get dressed
Brush teeth & hair
Read
Free write in journal
Math game
Lunch
Reading quizzes
Ride scooter
Crafting
Help make dinner
Now that I type it out, the list looks bonkers. Reminder: she’s 7. But when I was writing it on her dry-erase board and having her cross things off one by one, it felt like I was warding off the chaos lurking at every door jamb and window frame.
I’ll try to explain my obsession with resolutions and to-do lists. I grew up Mormon, but I’m not really Mormon anymore. Forget what you’re thinking about Mormons, I don’t want to talk about any of that. I want to tell you how growing up Mormon made me a goal-oriented person. Through my childhood and adolescence I tracked scripture verses memorized, good deeds done, and goals achieved splayed out across booklets, wall-hangings, and charts. I loved the feeling of accomplishment, the recognition received at milestones, when the bishop would call me up to the chapel pulpit in front of God and everybody and hand me a trinket to note that I had leveled up.
School is great in terms of getting recognized for leveling up, and fed my recognition junkie habit. When I was in elementary school, we could earn a personal pizza for every six books we read, and a star sticker for every pizza. Guess who was eating pizza once a week? My obsession with lists and achievement extended into adulthood and a phase where I organized my routines based on Getting Things Done by David Allen, then I reorganized based on advice from the Inbox Zero guy, and then in 2016 I learned about the bullet journal, which I’ve been using to organize my days ever since.
Regardless of my devotion to productivity, back in March I began to realize the uselessness of a detailed to-do list for my daughter. I stopped counting the days. We settled into a new routine that didn’t require a dry-erase board. But I did keep making lists for myself. My journal from March records where we got takeout, when we had an online happy hour with friends, and includes notes about rescheduling work events and camping trips. I even wrote down what we were watching on TV. Turns out that for me, being able to define and visualize my daily life is more than just an accountability tactic, it's a deeply ingrained practice at this point, that imparts consistency and normalcy to my life.
The lists we have on our refrigerator right now are movies we want to watch as a family, meals we’re going to make this week, and a “Fun Things to Do This Month” list that is mostly baking projects. So, I’m still making lists religiously. It doesn’t feel futile – it’s a way of giving myself something to look forward to. Seeing the differences in my daily entries helps me ward off the boredom and sameness that sneak up on me.
This year has tested our flexibility and resilience, and we’ve gotten used to changing plans. But some days it’s still difficult. On one recent day, my daughter and I were getting ready to go to the park for an outdoor playdate. A few minutes before we left, my friend called to ask if we could meet in a different park. Her husband’s a cop and had just texted to let her know there was a shooting near the park where we were headed. “Go somewhere else,” he directed.
Heart pounding, but with my face composed, I arranged with my friend to go the opposite direction and meet at another park. Then I told my daughter – not about the shooting – just that we were meeting near her school instead of our regular spot. And she lost it. “I can’t take another change of plans!” she wept. “Why can’t anything go the way I want it to go?” Aiming for compassion, I tried to comfort her and told her that these days we have to be as flexible as a rubber band, and she immediately responded, “I’m a broken rubber band!”
It’s not about the park, I know that. It’s virtual 2nd grade, and missing her friends, and missing her grandparents. It’s spending way too much time with her parents. It’s not knowing when any of this will change. She was probably also picking up on the tension and worry that I felt about violence in our neighborhood – she doesn’t miss much. And the thing is, with everything that has happened to us in 2020, some days you just feel like a broken rubber band.
Besides teaching me the importance of goal-setting and achievement, my early years in the church taught me something about faith: When you don’t have what it takes to carry on, you have faith that tomorrow will be another day, and whatever tribulation has beset you, it won’t last forever. We’re all rubber bands.
And we’ll bounce back.
Melissa Bowles-Terry grew up on the Idaho-Utah border on a farm that’s been in her family for more than a century. She has lived in southern Nevada for seven years and is a librarian, a mom, and the black sheep of her family of origin.
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