Can’t!
I’m going to share two stories, a quarter century apart, very different experiences that both taught me about my limits.
Story #1: I was “seventeen going on eighteen”, reveling in the adventure of living away from home and starting university. At school, I was a keener, and proud of it. My roommates were keeners too, apparently. The stereotypical student fridge, overflowing with leftover fast food and multiple milk jugs marked with their owner’s initials, would not do for us. We agreed to pool our grocery money and our food. We charted out responsibilities for cooking dinners, shopping, cleaning. We even (I blush to admit it) baked our own bread.
And thus, one Saturday in September, my first turn to buy the week’s groceries came around. One of my roommates, the only one of us with a car, asked if I would like a ride. But as the supermarket was just a couple of blocks away and the shopping list looked tiny and I was resolved on proving my independence, I turned her down. Alas, my young naïve self was about to get her first experience with the sorcery that turns a tiny list into a cornucopia of beverages, cans and packages - an abundance that weighed considerably more than the list I had so effortlessly carried to the store. Waiting in line for check-out, I realized that the journey home was going to be a bit more challenging. To make matters worse, I had never in my sheltered small-town existence been introduced to the frowned-upon but essential misdemeanor of borrowing a grocery cart for the trip home.
But I was not daunted! I asked the check-out clerk to pack everything into two of those large paper bags in which groceries were carried before the retail world lapsed into the error of plastic. She somehow managed it, milk and flour at the bottom, produce in the middle, and eggs balanced carefully on top; I took a deep breath, slung my purse around my neck, clamped one arm securely around each bag and began to walk. Now it was a simple matter of determination and putting one foot in front of the other for several blocks. Hopefully, there would be someone nearby to push the crosswalk button when I reached the only major intersection on my way.
I barely made it out to the parking lot. I remember watching in fascination as my left arm, disregarding explicit instructions, began to shake and then gave way. My right arm quickly followed, and my purchases were rolling, bursting, and splattering all over the pavement. My embarrassment was overshadowed by my absorption with the phenomenon I had just observed: I told my arms to hang on, and they didn’t! Kipling told me I could “hold on, when there is nothing in [me] except the Will that says to [me]: ‘Hold on!’ ”, but it turned out that my “heart and nerve and sinew” had a Can’t that overrode my Will.
What could I do but stack the remains of my groceries beside the outer wall of the store and humbly ask the woman at the customer service desk for four more bags and the use of her phone? My roommate was there in five minutes to ferry home our groceries and my wounded pride. I had learned a lesson - but not for the last time, oh no . . .
Story #2: It was the fall of 2003. My sixth baby was four months old; my oldest was eleven. That September I made an error comparable to correlating the length of a shopping list to the weight of its fulfillment: I made a schedule for the coming school year, based on the theory that if there was a blank space on the calendar, I had time for another commitment.
We were homeschooling full-time. You need to know two things. First, in my province, the school board will reimburse homeschoolers up to a certain amount for what they spend to support their students’ learning. Second, there was a little box I could check on our homeschool registration forms: “We will follow the Alberta curriculum.” If I didn’t check that box, we could use a complete, out-of-the-box American-based math curriculum, we could choose what to explore in Science and Social Studies according to our interests and circumstances, and I only had to prepare a minimum of records to show our school board representative that the kids were learning. If I did check that box, my workload went up dramatically - but we got more homeschool funding. For the first time ever that September, I checked the Alberta curriculum box. I had too much experience to blame this decision on naivete: let’s call it a moment of postpartum insanity.
The “best” part was that the extra homeschool funding would allow me to enroll the kids in so many more extracurricular activities - Brownies, Cubs, swimming, skating, dance and drama classes - which in turn meant loading six kids into the car and driving to classes every day of the week - but that was okay, because there was still some white space on my calendar, right?
It was great. The kids learned at least as much as they had when our homeschool plans were more free and easy, and those outside classes were filled with valuable experiences that we still look back on with satisfaction.
And I held it together for eight weeks - until my birthday. It wasn’t that my birthday was a harder day than the previous sixty had been - it was just the same. Pulling myself out of bed after a night interrupted by a nursing baby. Teaching a math lesson while soothing a toddler. Watching the clock and nagging and scrambling to deliver two girls to a special activity on time, and then repeating the process a few hours later to bring them home again. I don’t usually cry easily - I don’t usually cry at all, even when it would be good for me - but on that birthday, I cried all day. I blubbered through the math lessons, sobbed while making sandwiches, pulled myself together somewhat to get behind the wheel and drive, and wept all the more when I got home. One part of my mind sat back and watched the phenomenon in wonder. Heart and nerve and sinew had once again rebelled against Will. The next day, I wrote a poem that was at once tongue-in-cheek and one of my most bitter:
Now, don’t stop reading yet, dear reader, because this is the most important part: As I wrote this, I found myself asking, “Do I regret those choices?” Certainly not! How could I learn where my limits were if I never tested them? The lesson is, when you meet those limits, to respect them. Soothe your sore muscles and bruised ego, reach out for help, laugh at yourself when you’re ready, and remember that experience. It might help you choose a little more wisely in the future- but it will certainly be a great story to share.
