Kindness Chronicles II

I made a promise to myself to go for two consecutive weeks without complaining.
My commitment to be complaint-free for two weeks is my gift of kindness to myself as well as to those around me.
Kind of the flip side of telling people when you notice nice things.
More recognition and appreciation of the positive.
Less looking for and commenting on the negative.

I thought I was starting out small. Just one two-week period in 2008. Any two weeks out of the entire 52 weeks available in the year. Thankfully, I was wise enough to include a leniency policy in my effort so as to avoid the very real possibility of having to flog myself for failing. I told myself that I could start over as many times as I need in order to reach my two-week goal.
I have already started over eight times.
My record is six days.
Yeah! Almost halfway to my goal and there are still eleven months left in the year!

I shared my promise with my youngest daughter. Now she is tracking me. She’s on the look out for any complaining.
And she calls me on it.
Every time.

I tried to scoot out of it once by tacking “not that I’m complaining” on to the end of a major whine.
She called it.

One morning, I observed that people should pull over to the side of the road when dropping off their children at school rather than just staying in the line of traffic and having children slide sleepily out of the car, which delays EVERYONE in the line, especially when each car in succession does the exact same thing!
She called that too.
I was using a “tone”.

She is a rigid taskmaster.
And I, it turns out, have been a complainer.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines complaining as

1. To express feelings of pain, dissatisfaction or resentment.
2. To describe one’s pains, problems or dissatisfactions.

Who knew? I thought I was being funny…sarcastic…even, clever. Turns out, it was complaining, complaining cleverly disguised as comedy, but complaining nonetheless.

Complaining has become a habit. It has become my own little stand up comedy routine, only I’m usually sitting and I usually only have an audience of one. I have justified it by saying that if I was laughing and causing others to laugh, I wasn’t really complaining. As though laughter somehow mitigated my negativity.

Like this morning. I had coffee with Carrie, just so we could chat and catch up. We talked about life and kids and men, all things ripe with complaint possibilities. We reaped a bountiful harvest and spent a lot of time laughing.
But when, I told her about my efforts to put a moratorium on complaining, she cocked one eyebrow and dipped her mouth behind hands that were clasped over her coffee mug, stifling a smile.
“I know,” I complained, realizing my blunder through the world of whine far too late, “Now I’m going to have to start at day one…Again!”

But I have had some successes.
I mean, six complaint-free days! Judging by my coffee date with Carrie, I’ve passed up dozens of opportunities to complain.
I managed not to complain about a particularly awful person I saw at my daughter’s basketball game. Ditto the long line at the gas station, the rude driver, the broken heater and the three trips to the grocery store.

I’m a work in progress. I have 45 years of training to overcome. Like Shrek, I am an onion -- I have a lot of layers left to peel.