Rotten eggs

My latest self-project is working on my laziness. I am a spoiled brat to the core and understanding that fact has brought about great insights to my personality.

I was the last of 5 children and came as a surprise to my middle class, 40-something parents. I'm not quite sure why or how, but they gave me lots of stuff that my older siblings never got. Piles of presents for holidays, tons of new clothes, freedom to go to public school instead of parochial school. There were situational benefits, like being able to have my own room at such a young age because my older sisters had moved out. The best way for me to get attention was to wine and pout; something that I still tend to do (my poor husband!). I never felt I needed to apply myself because I was well taken care of. Why should I work when everything I needed was already here? My parents said to not worry about money, just keep being good. So here I am at 33 hoping that being good is going to bring me some sort of reward. UgH! If only I could throw out that card of my playing deck.

My parents were not always middle class. They were born right after the great depression and remember everyone having food stamps. They got jobs in their early teens to help out with the family, or babysat siblings so Mom could go to work, and went to parochial schools were all they spoke was French and Latin and the nuns would hit you with rulers if you didn't follow the rules. They understood what hard work meant and never let their emotions rule their actions (or at least from how the stories are told).

But when you grow up spoiled, which seems to be easy to do these days, all you do is react to your surroundings however you want to without the worry of negative repercussion. What you need to survive is readily available. Food, fridge and cabinets full, a place to live, and people that care about you and want to give you those things and want you to be happy. Most of the time they give it to you, just to shut you up- as in my case. But I see it in my children as well. The ungratefulness. So how am I passing this ill fate on?

My husband, on the other had, grew up in poverty with only a brother and an unstable mother. He remembers his mom bringing home a grocery bag full of brown rice one day and that is all they ate for weeks. He was constantly moving from apartment to apartment, from state to state until the age of 7 when he went to live with his grandparents. He started making his own money early with a paper route. In high school, he sold sodas out of a cooler in the band room, and worked almost full time at a bakery. While I sat on my fat ass and tooled around at a dumpy discount clothing store at minimum wage and no desire for anything more. Lazy.

Fast forward 18 years and here I am sitting at a desk in my home office, fighting the lazy thoughts of "why bother". "Why would I want to do all that work anyway?". It is as if I keep waiting for something to happen so that I don't have to do work. Ya know, the stuff that needs to get done but you don't want to do it.

The situation has changed, I have changed. Yet, these thoughts still force themselves into my tiny little brain and sabotage all my motivation.