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AWOL FROM THE ENLISTED LIFE | PAGE 1, 2
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The mother of all home to-do lists seizes every opportunity to bud off into more specialized progeny. My most rebellious offspring, the grocery list, is a consistent failure. In a sure sign that I need to get out a whole lot more, I am able to visualize with great precision every aisle of my local store, and I prepare my list by mentally walking up and down the aisles and jotting down needed items. Unfortunately, I always either leave this list at home or somehow fail to read it through carefully until after I've made it into the checkout line, so that I have to go back again and again, like some sort of disorganized addict at the methadone clinic, even though I try to convince myself that I'm really more like a gay, serially shopping Parisian housewife minus the string bag and baguette.

The vacation list is no vacation. Buying the tickets, reconfirming the reservations, reserving the ride to the airport, packing the kids and love objects of the moment ("But I wanted Pandy, not Panda! You packed the wrong one!"). The clock really ticks on this one, and omissions can have serious ramifications (such as Dehydrated Kitty Syndrome, which we narrowly averted last year when I forgot to put "hire cat sitter" on thelist). On the other hand, a jolly endpoint awaits, and there's something enormously cheering about the fact that I've placed "glue-gun daisies back onto Becca's sunglasses" on a par with "reserve car" and "finalize Watkins contract before departure."

Like millions of other moms, every fall I soldier through the back-to-school lists. Teachers mail these treacherous items, often decoyed with apples, pencils or other school totems on brightly colored paper, a week or two before school begins, when the entire world is conveniently away on vacation. As a result, I'm banging my cart into the other bleary-eyed moms at the dreaded Caldor's once again, this time in the wee hours, each of us poring over a list like it's the Rosetta stone. I'm convinced the teachers compose these with a kind of scavenger-hunt mentality, hoping to spare us, I suppose, from the boredom of a simple trip to the five-and-dime. The latest unfindable item was a particular brand of two-pocket folder in six specific colors, necessitating a canvassing of seven different stores to round out the rainbow. My kindergartner's list was more like a Price Club inventory, with requests for bulk napkins, cups and wipies along withthe obligatory items; when did we move from the simple pencil case to outfitting a battalion for siege? (My best friend's list for her fifth grader was a minor Proustian madeleine, failing to include for the first time a request for crayons. Can we all agree that life without crayons is tragic?)

The calendar, of course, is the list's wicked stepmother. I meticulously transfer all important dates from the school calendar (the diabolical-for-working-mom "planning half days," the "wear sneakers" days for gym) to the master calendar (which at our house is extremely strong on Polish saint's days -- an annual gift from a cherished former boss -- but frankly a little shaky on traditionally major events such as Labor Day). I can't help but feel that this is time I could have spent profitably investing in the market or translating Icelandic sagas. Every fall we are abruptly yanked from the soothing palette of the occasional pencil mark on the wall calendar --"Barbecue at Sharon's" -- to a grim gray palimpsest suddenly filled with piano lessons, soccer practice, gymnastics, religious instruction, PTA meetings, birthday parties and more.

And if we're talking September, we're just minutes away from the Halloween costume shopping lists, the Thanksgiving guest lists, the Christmas and Chanukah card lists, the holiday gift lists ... If I ever manage to get to the bottom of one of my "Things to Do" sheets, it's only because I need fresh blank space for the next list of chores.

The tyranny of all these lists, of course, is that they're promises made to be broken, guilty reminders of how I'm falling down on the job. But who's making those promises, after all, and who's laying on the guilt trip? A moment's reflection reveals that, despite my better angels, apparently I'm still subscribing to that "you can have it all" credo. And once you think you can have it all, it invariably follows that you've got to keep track of all you have. This way lies madness; lists are just another species of self-inflicted wound. And the only way to get rid of all those paper cuts is to cut the paper.

I could start by being a hell of a lot more selective about what makes it onto those lists in the first place. I suspect there's a lot I could simply let go of completely without perturbing the Earth's revolution. I could delegate more -- physically and psychically detaching those lists and pressing them on other responsible souls. But what I really need is a kind of self-parasitizing list designed to eat itself alive:

1. Resign from any organized activity prefaced by "steering" or "coordinating" unless it involves yachts or cool boot-purse combos.
2. Put seed catalogs directly on recycle pile.
3. Hide Internet access capability from all grade-school teachers.
4. Overcome guilt at not planning to buy or sell overpriced fund-raising nutty bars, wrapping paper or "student literary magazines."
5. Hand shopping list to significant other, with subsidiary list of helpful definitions, such as "fruit" (e.g., excludes caramel-coated items from which sticks protrude), "entree" (e.g., excludes cocktail franks) and "dairy product" (e.g., excludes chocolate).
6. Cancel subscriptions to any magazines with cover lines that include the words "new you," "makeover," "thighs" or "buns," retaining onlythose with cheery word jumbles.
7. Stop making lists.

Wait, let me write that down.
SALON | Feb. 1, 1999

Elizabeth Rapoport is an executive editor at TimesBooks/Random House. Her last story for Salon was How many working fathers does it take to screw in alightbulb? She is a contributor to "Mothers Who Think: Tales ofReal-Life Parenthood," edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses, forthcomingfrom Villard Books in May.