Routine Maintenance Is Essential for the Life of...

As our children continue into their later teenage years and into their mid-twenties, I am finding the hardest lesson to teach all of them is something that my Mother-In-Law used to tell my husband when he was a teen:  “People do not plan to fail. They fail to plan.”

People plan for vacations, and they plan when they will pay their bills. They plan for their deaths, and they plan Labor Day weekend bar-b-ques. Some plan out every detail of their wardrobe weeks before a big event. There are business plans, floor plans and health insurance plans, all designed to map out a set of parameters and guidelines that the user can expect to experience.

Teaching my younger humans to get in the habit of planning has been difficult and frustrating at best, costly and infuriating at worst. I did not plan on experiencing such resistance when it came to encouraging my kids to think ahead.

Maybe it is because I am not the greatest of planners. I would be described by most as a procrastinator. I put off many things until I have no other option than to address what I know I should have attended to in a prior moment. I have wasted coupons that would have saved me money, lost out on seats to a show I wanted to see, and I’ve watched items become unavailable as they sold out before I checked out my cart. I have paid late fees on registrations that I had more than enough time to submit by the due date.

Not acting in a timely fashion has caused me to miss out on some things that I wanted, but procrastination has never been my go-to when it came to taking care of myself. I see my PCP for my annual physical, and I get my mammogram each year just before that physical. If I feel something is “off” in my body, I get immediately on the phone and schedule an appointment to be seen. I am not one for “waiting it out,” to see if something serious develops. My car is inspected within the month that the sticker says it should happen and my oil changes and tire rotations occur soon after the indicator light goes off in my car. I make sure that the important things do not get pushed to the bottom of the To Do List because the alternative is not an option. The alternative means a greater headache than the one in my head from staring up at the fluorescent lights above the hygienist’s chair. Procrastination curates a greater time suck with hours spent waiting in the dealership addressing the additional problems brought on by old oil and clogged filters.

It is a common direction found in manuals and on the sales floor for everything from bicycles to cars, vacuums to lawn mowers, as well as the Keurig machine to the oven:  Routine maintenance is essential to the life of that product. Proper care of your small and large vehicles, equipment and appliances facilitates the longevity that the manufacturer has determined through trials and tests. Comprehensive care extends the life of that object to an extent that may exceed the warranty and the life of the user behind it. Maintenance is key.

Most recently, Jakob and I got into it about a dentist appointment. He was told at his last cleaning that he needed to schedule a deep-scale appointment and it would probably cost about $1,000.00. When I asked him on Wednesday if he had scheduled the appointment, he told me he didn’t have the money. To be clear, the reason Jakob needs a deep scale of his teeth is because he hadn’t been to the dentist since his senior year of high school. Between being away at college, Covid, being away at college again and finally settling in back at home, the appointment kept getting knocked off his list of things to do.

He tried to get away from me, but I followed him to his room to harangue him on the virtues of taking care of his oral health. The $1,000.00 he doesn’t have now is nothing compared to the teeth he won’t have tomorrow and the $5,000 it costs for an implant. And I didn’t even cover the physical pain that comes along with losing a tooth because of poor care.

Life is about maintaining. Maintain your health, maintain your salary, maintain the relationships in your life. They all require work. The work is necessary to stem the onslaught of degradation brought on not just by age, but by hazardous periods of neglect and dismissal. If we keep up with the maintenance, we can usually avoid the costly and painful fixes and repairs. It doesn’t matter if it’s your car or your body, they both need maintenance, and they will both reel against you if you choose not to take care of them.