Different Drum: New camp chair purchase reflects subtle shift
I’ve been reading a lot lately and about motivational interviewing (MI) and applying it to myself. What better way to test an approach than on oneself? MI is a guiding style of communication designed to empower people to change by drawing out their own meanings, importance and capacity for change. It’s a respectful and curious way of being with people that facilitates the natural process of change and honors the autonomy of the person you are working with.
After having several facilitative conversations with myself, I became convinced it was time to usher out the old and in the new. Was it a self-destructive behavior I needed to dump and replace with a more functional one? Kinda sorta. I mean, an underlying thrifty behavior was proving in need of replacing. I’ll let you decide.
Approximately a decade ago, when my son and my daughter were still heavily involved in community baseball and softball team play, I knew I needed to replace the threadbare pair of blue camp chairs I had for years been taking to the ballpark sidelines. They were an inexpensive set to begin with, but constant use had caused their joints to slip and their seats to sag. And it was getting nearly impossible to get up out of them without the third-party aid.
“Hey, could you possibly give me a hand?” I had been forced to reach out to a passerby on an embarrassing number of occasions, “My bottom seems to be a little stuck to the bottom of this chair and my only other alternative is to tip over sideways in hope the impact of the fall will jar me loose.”
People have mostly been sympathetic to my plight and stepped in and reached out a hand with a hearty grip that yanks me forward and dislodges me from my rickety camp chair. But you can tell from the expressions on their faces they want me to buy a better set of fold-up chairs so they won’t have to be bothered again with this kind of borderline-creepy request.
So after that game, I went out and found a half-price, end-of-season sale set of four similar chairs in a burgundy color. I was just looking for something slightly more decent to sit in and get out of on my own steam at my children’s ball games. The new chairs appeared sturdy and attractive enough, but were nothing to write home about. When I let a friend lower his 200-plus-pound body into one of them, it collapsed faster than when Golidilocks test-drove Baby Bear’s chair. I ran back to the store where I’d purchase the chairs and bought a replacement.
In retrospect, that was a stupid purchase, as within just a couple of summer ball seasons, all four chairs began deteriorating mechanically. However, I tolerated them for eight additional years because they still managed to look decent, even while spilling our drinks, poking us in the small of the back and folding up on us unexpectedly. Finally, I mentally gave myself permission to buy better replacements following the next sign of personal injury from our lawn furniture.
However, when this spring rolled around, even with no ball games on any of our calendars, I went out and bought new chairs the first time Menard’s had its better camp chairs on sale. After the sale price and the 11% storewide rebate, six 300-pound capacity Guidesman steel folding director’s chairs ended up costing me approximately $30 apiece.
When I came home and showed off to my children the new chairs, with their special fold-up side trays with drink holders, my adult kids displayed more excitement that they had in a long time.
“Wow, Mom, this is great. I like you got these new chairs before the old ones completely collapsed,” said my son, swiping two to have in his vehicle.
“Amazing! You can actually exit these chairs,” complimented my daughter. She and her boyfriend grabbed two on their way to a bonfire.
Both kids wondered why I had waited so long to upgrade chairs.
“I answered this question to myself through MI,” I said. “I’m frontloading economic pain to save myself backside pain.” Autonomy and anatomy intact.
— Kristy Smith’s Different Drum humor columns are archived at her blog: diffdrum.wordpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Coldwater Daily Reporter: Different Drum: New camp chair purchase reflects subtle shift
