runs in the family

When I was about ten I was medically diagnosed as lazy. My grandmother took me to the clinic one summer to have my iron checked. She assumed I was anemic because I was listless and lacked energy. (Disregard the stifling heat and humidity of the Georgia summer, that certainly had nothing to do with it.) The nurse pricked my finger and squeezed the hell out of it, then she left with the sample. A few minutes later she was back with the results. Anemia? "Nope, she's fine," said the nurse. "Just lazy."

That's my story about being lazy, but really, the real story about laziness goes way further back than that. It goes back to my mom and my dad, first married, when my Dad got out of the Airforce and my mom realized she'd married a "loafer." I know this the way I know a lot of things I wish I didn't know: people talked to me. Even when I was really young, adults vented to me like I was some kind of pocket confessional. My mom, my dad, even my beloved grandmother. This is *still*, 30-plus years later, one of mom's favorite complaints to repeat about my dad. He's a lazy bum who has to be told what to do all the time or he just wallows in slovenliness.

When she met him he was stationed in Miami. He was crisp and clean and I'm sure she thought he was passably handsome and his Georgia drawl probably seemed pretty charming. All that, plus the promise that this farm-boy would take her away from her own mother she couldn't stand and whisk her off to a pastoral wonderland where she would definitely own and ride horses (every girl's dream), was all she needed to marry him. Her first sign that things would not go well? He stopped shaving as soon as he was out of the Air Force.

It got worse from there. "I could always tell when your dad had been laid off," she would say. "It was the only time he'd come in from work smiling." Laid off, he would "mope around the house doing nothing" all day until she finally made him get another job or the lay off ended. They eventually ended up moving in next door to my dad's parents so he could "mooch off his parents for the rest of his life." It wasn't long before mom (with little me in tow) left. He was devastated. Too bad for him. "He wanted me to tell him what to do, to make him shave and go to work and give him structure in his life," mom would say. "Sorry. Not my job. So he married Suzanne and now she runs his life and I'm sure he's as happy as he could be."

Personally, I don't think he'll ever be all that happy, but the rest of mom's assessment sounds about right. As for me, over the years I started to see that no-good, laziness in myself and it terrified me. I mean, there's a laziness that's ok -- a kid's laziness. The pull to lay in the floor of a nice cool house watching t.v. rather than playing outside in the heat and humidity of a sweltering southern summer day. That laziness makes sense. But as I got older, I got scared of the other, adult-laziness that is too close to the fatal laziness of my dad. The lack of ambition. The complacence. Left to my own devices, I am temporarily content to do very little and the less I do, the more I dread doing anything more. Because I spent my childhood hearing this demonized in my father, it is hard to reframe into anything less than disgusting, pathetic behavior when I now see it in myself.

I work. I go to school. I maintain my life, but just by a thread. All the official things are precariously balanced and I am often afraid, as the stakes get inevitably higher, that I will realize too late that I have made some huge blunder, some huge gaffe, and it will be too late to correct. I only want a simple life that feels, somehow, meaningful, and I have no idea how to get it. Maybe it is that we, my dad and I, are both in the wrong era. My dad fantasizes about a simple life too -- a life on a farm with a horse and a buggy and goats and a garden and when I go visit him, he tells me how much he'd enjoy a life like that. That would not be a lazy life, it would be a hard-working farm life. That's the kind of work my dad enjoys. If I could find the kind of work *I* enjoy and build a life around it, I would be set. I wouldn't have to worry about being lazy and I wouldn't have to beat myself up. But is it possible? I don't know.