The Kettle and the To Do List

The kettle bubbled furiously, but Liza was too lost to hear the click of it turning off. Safety features saving her again from a disaster of boiled-over mess. Her teabag sat comfortably in the mug she had pulled down hours ago, when she was in the mood for tea, but without the time to make it. She hated the stereotype that enveloped mothers of them never getting to enjoy hot beverages and scoffed that her fairly strict routine would ever allow for children to interrupt such indulgences, if one could even consider a hot beverage an indulgence.

Still, it was often her own undoing that kept her from enjoying the beverage, anyway, the constant tick, tick, ticking of the to do list in her brain throughout the day, making remembering that she had put the water in the kettle sink into the abyss of the to do list, rarely to be seen again.

This afternoon the thoughts that trapped her into inaction fluttered around, crashing into the sides of her head, unable to be ignored. Each time, they slashed right through the mental to-do list she rebuilt many times that day. Always fighting for the attention those feelings wanted. Winning a small victory every time they tore through the list, leaving the shredded bits to fall and be metaphorically picked up and re-assembled, always slightly messier than the time before.

Indeed, focus was elusive, today.

She scribbled down a few words: mail cards, meal plan, grocery list, check in with a client, enter payment and issue receipt, dance costume check…

It was a futile attempt to move some of the list out of her head, and she knew it even as she wrote them down. Still, there was hope. Hope that it might not always be all in her head. The doorbell camera sent a notification off on her phone, alerting her that “someone is at your front door”, and because she wasn’t expecting a package, she headed in that direction, realizing two steps later that her slipper sock was only half on. Pulling it up, she bumped into the gate that kept her garbage-surfing dog out of the kitchen and over-corrected by stubbing her toe on the thing.

“Moth-er…” she managed to choke out quietly and sharply inhale, knowing that exhaling would help the pain but unable to actually do so in her state. A few more steps and she could walk straight, again, with no limp, and unlocked the door to grab the now apparently four packages, none of which were addressed to her. Was it cliché to roll your eyes at your husband’s packages? She didn’t really mind. Something in her life being a cliché might be a welcome change.

Packages successfully delivered down the hallway to her husband’s home office meant she was headed back to the kitchen, turning off the lights in three rooms that her children were not in, yet had chosen to illuminate for eternity. A quick tap on the thermostat told her that the chill she was feeling was actually warranted, and she adjusted the temperature up, pulling the sleeves of her sweatshirt all the way past her wrists.

The dog arrived at her side, walking just in front and barely out of her footpath, forcing her to slow down her forward progress and notice that the couch was covered in a zoo’s worth of stuffed animals. She simply wouldn’t sit on the couch. She didn’t have time to sit, anyway. She needed to get back to the kitchen to make her tea.

The blend she had chosen for that afternoon was a kind of fruity herbal tea, which wasn’t really her favorite, but the fruit flavor in it often reminded her of a vacation somewhere tropical, and though she traveled quite frequently, the opportunity had been rare, as of late. If she could fake it with some fruity herbal tea and get some kind of hydration in the process, she considered it a win. Besides, her caffeine source was coffee, and she had already had two cups, which meant that drinking something without caffeine was her only hope at not dehydrating today. Because she needed something else to add to…

Her list!

While she up, she figured she might as well start today’s load of laundry, so she headed back down the hallway to collect laundry hampers, which, at least her kids remembered to fill as they got undressed each day. They were surprisingly good about it, and it was one of the small favors life threw Liza’s way. Pulling three baskets at once back down the hallway to the laundry room, the dog stopped suddenly at her feet, so she did, too.

“Um. Can you move?”

As though that was a command she had ever bothered to teach her dog. No. The dog knew “bang!” meant to play dead, sit, lay down, sometimes would stay, twirl, up and down, “salutations” for a paw shake, and knew “come”. “Um, can you move” was never one she thought to add to the list.

The dog showed no signs of moving, but Liza did. So, at the last second, the dog turned directly into Liza’s already throbbing knee, and they each continued in their opposite directions. No one used “grace” to described Liza, anyway. She was unbothered by the collision.

Starting the laundry and heading back through to the kitchen, she realized the house was quieter than it was supposed to be and wasn’t sure where her girls had run off to. She considered yelling for them to see where they were, but then that to do list started ticking off again…

Listen for the washer to move the clothes to the dryer, prep dinner, read to the girls, we probably need to do some fine motor skills practice with something…

And before she knew it, she was in the kitchen again, dragging out her meal planning calendar because suddenly she just knew she wanted to make pot roast, a chicken casserole, and tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner next week, and if she didn’t write it down, she would definitely…

The kettle was off! How long had it been off? Too long to brew properly, now, she realized, and flipped the switch back on to boil the water again. She was sure every British citizen was yelling at her now about the proper way to make a cup of tea and how you didn’t need to boil the water this many times, but she had already moved on to digging out the checkbook so she could write the check for girls’ dance recital costumes. As she was finishing it off and tucking it back into her wallet, which slid into her purse, she noticed another light on to turn off, and made her way back into the kitchen.

Honestly, it wasn’t always like this, but it wasn’t as simple as making the to do list and then crossing off the tasks on the to do list, and she could never understand the people who thought it is. Wonderful lives they must have, she thought, but it just never seemed to work out quite that way for her. There was always an interruption, always a new task to add to the list, always something else that had to be tended. Like a meal!

Out came the calendar for meal planning again, and to work she went, filling in lunches and dinners for her family and making the grocery list next do it. She knew she had ideas of what she wanted to fill in, but, the old standards of home made hamburger helper, tortilla soup, and frozen pizzas made the list again, which mostly the kids and her husband would enjoy. She added in her favorite, ham fried rice, because in her family, she had preached “everyone got their turn with their favorite”, and we weren’t going to complain about not liking food when at least there was food, and they didn’t have to check the damaged cart for the cans that got dinged in processing. A memory she’d rather not have return to reality, so she called the meal planning done.

A friend messaged about some trouble with a kid’s doctor’s appointment, so Liza’s only real choice was to answer to be a friend. Actually, nothing that had to be done had a clear deadline for being done, so what was the difference in waiting five more minutes to talk a friend through some medical anxiety and be a good person? Nothing. Great. Liza always felt better making the choice to be present for people—even electronically—rather than be pounding away at a to do list.

Upon her return to the world in front of her, her middle child had finished reading one book and was tearing through the bookshelves for the next in the series, the bookshelf on the opposite side of the room from where the series she was looking for always sat. Help was in order, and Liza was up to the task, but upon pulling down the book her child was looking for, she realized there was a stack of books from last year she had placed sideways on the shelf that needed to be tucked back in where they belonged, and took care of that, too.

By this time, the washer dinged, and she felt so proud of herself for switching it to the dryer immediately, but it meant she had to take a dry load out of the dryer and put it on the couch to be folded and hung later because she was doing…something else, wasn’t she?

“Mommy, the light went off!”

The small voice of her youngest reminded her that the kettle had stopped. How long had it been off? She got up and flipped the switch to restart the process, standing next to the kettle this time, so she wouldn’t miss her cup of tea. Her afternoon indulgence, if you could call a hot beverage an indulgence.