You expected them to accomplish ... what?

I haven't been posting much lately, and I was kind of having trouble thinking what to write about next. Then Wife handed me a topic on a silver platter. She asked the boys to clean out their toy chest.

Now, I should explain that this toy chest sits next to the dining table, because it is such a small house. And it has been years since we last went through it trying to find things to throw away or donate to somebody ... anybody .... Therefore it is literally spilling over, which does add to the inconvenience of seating somebody at that end of the table. So it wasn't a bad idea to start with. Heaven knows, it would make the house look less cluttered (if not by enough). What's more, unlike asking the boys to clean up their room, the toy chest is a confined, finite problem. There's a clear beginning and end. It would seem hard to go wrong with a task like this.

Wife, though, seems in cases like this to have a special gift for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And I knew she had managed exactly that when she IM'ed me at work -- at the end of the day -- to complain with surprise about how little they wanted to discard.

I didn't say a word, but my thoughts went like this: Let me get this straight. You are surprised? That must mean you didn't see it coming. But weren't you sitting there with them helping them make the decision about each toy one at a time? No, I guess you couldn't have been or you wouldn't have been surprised at the end of the day, which is apparently when you finally found out what they had done (or not done). So that must mean that you told them what to do and then walked away and expected them to do it -- just do it -- to the standards that you would have used had you been doing it instead. Now babe, try to remember that these are two little boys we are talking about here; they aren't even teenagers yet, for heaven's sake. And as for being able to carry out a task like this on their own, ... well I don't trust highly-paid professionals in my office to carry out seemingly simple tasks on their own if the tasks aren't inside their specialty. If I want feedback from them that makes sense or is useful to me, I have to be in the room with them and walk them by the hand through what I need from them. And you expect two pre-teen boys to be more reliable than that? That would be ... why? Without sitting there between them to facilitate, or manage the activity, you expected them to accomplish ... what?

But this is how Wife is, when it comes to her expectations of other people. Other people will naturally read her mind and do things the way she thinks they ought to be done, without her having to put herself out about it. Then when they don't she takes it personally. She gets truly, deeply offended when the boys goof off, or drop their chores in the middle to go have a squirt gun fight, even if it has been hours since she checked up on them. She understands this as "deliberate defiance" and "deliberate disrespect" and she takes it as a sign that the boys hold her in contempt. Then she lurches to the other extreme and assumes she has to hover over them, which usually involves screeching at them as she hovers. The boys yell back, or cry, or turn sullen, and everybody is miserable.

After an hour or a day of this, I come home from work; and Wife vents to me about how disrespectful and lazy the boys are. When she does, it is all I can do to keep from saying, "Gosh, dear, they are never that way for me. I find them to be remarkably helpful and cooperative as boys that age tend to go; and while they will josh and tease ruthlessly, I encourage that and would never dream of calling them disrespectful." I have stood up for them in the past, and at this point the boys know that Wife is going to be over the top in this area so I don't think I have to make a point of it each time. This is just as well, because saying what I think inevitably generates the defiant response "Well then why didn't they _____ [fill in the blank] like I told them to, instead of playing with squirt guns all afternoon?"

Don't be misled by the question mark on the end of that sentence. It's not a question. There is no desire for an answer, for any transfer of information. I know this because the times that I tried to answer it as if it were a question, I stepped on a land mine. I tried to suggest: if you want the boys to take on a big project, you have to be there with them. You have to help -- or at least facilitate -- every step of the way. It has to be all of you ("us") who are doing this project, not just them ("you"). And you have to give them the illusion of a certain amount of independence without the reality. This means working with them for a while, then walking away for ten minutes after leaving very explicit instructions for about five minutes' worth of work. Then come back and check how it is going. Repeat as needed. Change up the order. Stay engaged. But don't check out, and don't lose your temper.

Whenever I gave this advice (before I learned not to), she found it patronizing. I never meant it to be. I don't know if it was ... or if somebody else would have felt that way, at least. I kind of assumed that anyone who knew all this stuff inside and out wouldn't be having the troubles she had. Invariably she would also be able to find at least one thing I said in my general inventory of advice that she had actually done that time. This would mean that she could always crow, "Well I did that! And they still didn't do what I told them to! So obviously you aren't any better than I am at managing them, and you shouldn't go around claiming to be Superdad and telling me that I don't know anything. You already undermine me enough, you know. That must be why the boys have no respect for me, since obviously you don't have any, either ...."

Yeah, I know. You don't want help, and any claims to the contrary are so much rhetoric. You don't want help because help is impossible ... after all, "help" implies getting you to do things differently than you do them right now, which implies that the way you are doing them right now is less than perfect, which implies that you are Wrong! And woe betide the man who dares to claim that you are Wrong about something. That's unpleasant country to find yourself in, and nobody wants to go there. Therefore help is impossible. Sigh ....