But not only did she work full-time, but she worked full-time in a place that was 45 minutes away, but you had to go through this tunnel, and if there was any traffic, that 45 minutes could easily be an hour and a half. So the variable there for her getting to her job and then wherever I was pretty big.

So I don’t have any negative feelings towards my mom about this, but I do see that coming out of that kind of childhood, I really made this vow in my heart, like, “I will never be like that. I will be a person who manages my life and anticipates things so I will be on time.”

Now, that comes from woundedness, right? Bob Schuchts of Restore the Glory has a three-series podcast. I mean, they have lots of podcast episodes, but three in a row about vows and wounds. I forget what the third level is.

And so, I made this vow because of this wound, and I created the identity of someone who isn’t late. And because I created that identity, I lived it out even after I had kids. I remember when I first had sweet little baby Rosemary, and the time it took to get out of the house was very different than it was before having a baby.

But I adjusted very quickly. I was like, “Okay, you gotta pack everything up. You gotta get the baby in the car seat. Then you gotta get the car seat in the car.” Like, I really began to understand the rigamarole of getting a baby out of the house somewhere else, and then I just adjusted that into my timeline sequence.

So if somewhere took me, you know, 30 minutes to get there, I would now think, “Okay, I gotta start getting ready at least 45 minutes before I have to be somewhere.” That’s when I would trigger. And I probably did spend more than 15 minutes in the very beginning, you know, as new moms do, and bring all the things and think about all the things. Certainly later I did not probably take as much time to get a baby in the car.

Then obviously I kept having children and they got older, and when they get older, it is harder to get them out of the house. Because a baby usually just gets in their car seat, or you put them there and they stay there. But a three-year-old will not put their shoes on, or a three-year-old has lost their shoes.

Actually, even still, even my nine-year-old, bless him, I’ll be like, “Get your shoes on,” and he’ll be like, “I don’t know where they are.” And I’ll think, “We just wore them, and we keep all the shoes by the front door. This isn’t like rocket science.” And so there are more things that come up the more children you have, and in my opinion, the older that they are.

So I just adjusted for that too, right? I remember someone saying, “You have to give yourself five minutes per kid to get out the door.” And I thought, “Yeah, that’s pretty true.” You know, with six kids, that’s 30 minutes. So I’m telling everyone, “Hey, it’s time to go. Get your shoes on. We’re going to the car.”

But in my mind, I know it will take a full 30 minutes for that to happen. I actually don’t think it takes 30 minutes for us. I think it takes closer to 20. But 20 minutes before I want to be driving away, I am riding those kids. “Get your things. Where’s your water bottle? What else do we need? Does anyone else need anything? Can I help you?”

And I fully believe that it is my job to help them. A lot of you know, “Oh yeah, their shoes are probably gonna be lost,” but then you think that the kids are gonna find the shoes. And that may or may not be true. Maybe sometimes it’s true. Maybe it’s always true.

But to a person whose identity is being on time. You also think, “I’m gonna manage the situation so that we’re on time. I’m gonna help them find their shoes.” It’s not important to any of them that we’re on time. It’s only important to me.

So I will say that after finding this work, gosh, maybe six years ago now, I really saw my be on time thing as woundedness, and I really healed that. And what that looks like is going back to e- just any particular memory from your childhood and revisiting it with Jesus and kind of rewiring it in your brain, and I teach you how to do that in the community.

And really making peace with being late does not mean anything about me. Being late does not mean that I am trying to send some sort of negative or disrespectful message to the person hosting the event. Being late does not have to mean anything about who I am and my character.

And It comes up sometimes that things out of my control happen, and then we are late to something. And I take a deep breath, and I just tell myself, “This is fine.” You know, sometimes I jokingly say, “This is not a salvation issue.”

My husband does not care about being on time. Like, you can just tell that’s just not part of his identity at all, and has no problem rolling in 15 minutes late to something, except for mass. He feels very strongly about being on time to mass, which is great. But outside of that, he really, really does not care.

And that’s okay. I also learned that that is okay for him, that I can know that if I’m sending him somewhere with my kids, they might be five to 10 minutes late, and that doesn’t have to mean anything terrible about the Jaquith family or our honor or our reputation. Like, it’s okay.

Now, there are different kinds of events where, you know, if we’re going to a performance and you’re gonna have to park really far away, I might prime him ahead of time like, “Hey, just so you know, you probably wanna get there 30 minutes early to find parking and get seating.” And I might make that suggestion to him and then let it go. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do.

But because I had this identity for so long, I still live like this. I’m still on time to most things, but it doesn’t come from this, like, panicky, stressful, compensating energy. Now, it’s just still part of who I am. I like being on time. I like anticipating traffic. I like packing all the things that we need and making sure that the kids are ready with all their things. I like that.

And so I mentioned this on a coaching call recently, and someone said, “How do you do that?” And so I think step one is really just deciding that you want to become a person who is on time, that you value that. Because a lot of you have the value of working out every day or consistently. My husband CrossFits five days a week. That’s just who he is.

And when something is who you are, you almost feel weird when you’re not doing it. And of course, things come up. Maybe he doesn’t feel well or maybe one of the kids needs something, and then he doesn’t go to CrossFit for one day. He doesn’t make a huge deal out of that because his identity is someone who does that all the time, and one day isn’t a big deal.

And that’s kinda how I feel about being on time. Like, there are some times where for whatever reason I’ll be late, but I am kinda like, “That’s okay. This was a one-off. This is not very common.” When we have an identity about ourselves again, there isn’t that much thinking about it because it just is who you are.

But you can create a new identity. You can adopt a new identity, but it requires you to really clearly decide, “This is who I want to be. I’m going to be like this.” And then you can ask yourself, “What would a person like this do?” And then you just have to practice it enough that your brain goes, “Okay, this is who we are.”

And depending on the thing that you’re trying to adopt in your life will depend on how long that takes, right? So they say that a small habit can take 21 days, but a large habit can take up to 250 days. You know, the better part of a year. So if you are chronically late to things, first of all, remember this is not a salvation issue. I love you. This is not a problem.

But if you are feeling like you live in chaos and you don’t like it, you bring the order. You bring peace and order to your home. And you can anticipate, you could start with the five minutes per kid rule. You can anticipate that if you have two kids, it will at least take you 10 minutes to get them out the door.

By the way, I think it takes 10. I think it takes five minutes to get from the kids being in the front door to the car, buckled in, and driving away. I feel like people really don’t account for that time. Like, you think, “Okay, we have to be driving away at 10:15,” so you’re walking out the door at 10:15.

And then you’re so shocked that it took a while to get the kids in the car. And I wanna say, “Why are you shocked about that?” It takes five minutes for them to do whatever shenanigans they’re gonna do. So you just begin plugging in the time.

And I was explaining to my daughter the other day, I said, ’cause she’s been driving the boys to school, so I’m in the passenger seat and she’s driving the boys to school. And it was one of those, like, crazy mornings and boys and things, and someone forgot their lunch, and we figured it out in the driveway, so we just turned around and came back.

But I could tell she was thinking something like, “This is crazy.” And I told her, I said, “Listen, yeah, k- getting kids ready for school or for anything is a banana circus.” And I said, “But it’s gonna be a banana circus no matter what you do. I can’t change that,” because children just bring chaos. And we have a lot of systems, and children still bring chaos.

And I said, “But the reason that we’re never late to school is because I just start the circus earlier than other people. I just started it earlier.” And so my boys, they get up at 6:30, and usually I have fed them eggs that I made, sometimes two different kinds of eggs, by 7:00. And then they really just have to brush their teeth and put their shoes on, and we don’t leave the house until 7:25.

So I give them 25 minutes to brush their teeth and put their shoes on and get to the car. And that’s a lot of time. There’s a lot of room there for, “Oh, no, where’s my math worksheet? Where’s my this thing? I’m playing with toys and not putting my shoes on at all. There’s time budgeted in for that.

And so it’s still a circus. It’s not like I have these, you know, perfect little ducklings that are, “Yes, Mom, I would love to put my shoes on. Of course I remembered my fleece.” You know, that’s not what’s happening. It’s a circus, but I just start the circus earlier, and it’s important to me. And I don’t like the feeling of being rushed. I personally do not like that feeling.

But you can control that for the most part. Now, we can’t control husbands, right? So he’s usually my wildcard factor. Like, if I am counting on him being home so that we can all leave, I either roll the dice on that and know that it may not happen, or if it’s very important to me, and not a lot fits that criteria, by the way.

Then I will again say, “Hey, it’s really important to me that you actually be home at this time, not 10 minutes after that time,” because I’ve kind of orchestrated the whole sequence of events to make sure that we get to this other place on time. And again, I’m really thinking about, like, plays or performances of some kind where I know it really matters that we’re there on time.

So I would just sit with yourself and say, “Is this important to me? Why is this important to me? Who would I be if I adopted this identity? What would my life look like? What would my life look like if I didn’t?”

And you could apply this to anything, like maybe you wanna be a person who stretches more, or washes your face. Like, you’re not a person who washes your face every night and you wanna be a person who washes your face every night. And you know this. You know about Atomic Habits. What’s the other one? There were two books that came out at the same time. It was like Atomic Habits and a white one with green on it. Can’t remember.

Anyway, lots of habits books, though. Lots of how do we create the identity of someone who is like this? But I just want you to know that it’s possible, and I want you to know that it’s possible to grow from a place of peace and health and loving who you are right now, not from a beat yourself up, I’m so terrible, this is a problem, I’m so wounded, and now I’m gonna try to stick this new identity into the mix. We’re not gonna do that.

So I want you to feel perfectly lovable the way that you are, and then calmly you can decide, “You know, I do think that this would be better, and I’d like to live like this. I’d like to be a person who’s on time.” And certainly made it sound so simple. It really is. It’s just getting the circus ready and triggering it a little bit earlier than you are.

And perhaps, accounting for what happens on the road. I have a pretty good understanding everywhere that I live the variable rate of how long it takes to get somewhere based on the time of day and how many red lights I hit, and so I just accommodate for that, too, for the longest amount of time.

So here where we live in Sandpoint, there’s a train system, and you can get stuck behind the train, which can take, you know, eight minutes. So if something’s really important to me, I account for the train time, or if we’re running close to time, like we don’t have that much time, there’s a different route I can take that skips the train.

So this is possible for you. But you have to decide that it’s important to you. And then you just go to work creating the identity of someone who lives like this. I cannot save you from the chaos of children. That will always be part of your life if children, I think all the way up until young adults, by the way, I’m not sure those 18-year-olds are making it any easier really.

There will be chaos in your home. But I think that it’s predictable chaos. And so I still feel like I can bring peace and order overall to us getting to places because I just account for the circus. And I still just manage the time that I’m triggering people.

All right, my friends. I think this is coming out after October, so we will have kicked off the One Million Rosaries campaign. I hope that you’re joining. You can join any time, because even if you joined on October 15th and then prayed 15 rosaries, it will still count towards the total.

So please sign up, tell your friends about it, and let’s watch that thermometer grow to a million. I’m really excited to give that gift to Mary. You know, I was thinking about being in heaven and seeing a field of one million roses, and that visual is so cool to my mind. Like, Mary, we’re making this garden for you of a million roses. We love you so much. And how cool to make kids be kind of the ones in charge of it.

All right, you guys, thank you so much for listening. I’m praying for you. Please pray for me, and have a blessed day.