We give my dad a 10 minute warning 20 minutes before we intend to leave. He gets ready promptly but there is ALWAYS some last minute incident/distraction that still puts us 5 minutes past the 20 minute buffer. Except the times when he is ready to go 15 minutes before everyone else and the appointed time and then gets irritated with the rest of us. @@

Zen,

what if you said a version of that to your family? What then?

Like, the time between saying they are leaving an event and the time they get to the door can be 45 minutes.

This is when I RUDELY grab people by the ear and pull them away. I ain't got time for that shit.

what if you said a version of that to your family? What then?

Oh, ha, no. Best case, everyone would blame someone else, two people would cry, and one person would dramatically down the rest of her drink, tell us all to fuck off, and speed away dramatically in her sports car. To fix the dysfunction, they'd have to stop being dysfunctional.

Not that I'm the poster child for emotional health myself, you know, and not that they're bad people; they're all generous and kind and funny when they're not being nutjobs.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who has to deal with dilly-dallying family members.

I am the dilly-dallying member of the family. Well, my mom is worse. But it just seems to happen.

I routinely lie to Tim if we have a time that can't budge (like a friend's birthday shindig at the go-kart place, where she had it reserved for a specific time block -- WAY different than going to Tim's family for a holiday dinner). That way when we are inevitably running "late," he asks why I'm not freaking out, and then I confess that I told him a fake time.

We're routinely late for "regular" things (dinners, movies, whatnot), because Tim is a time agnostic. Sometimes I drive separately to things, and other times I just grit my teeth and deal.

For YEARS we had to tell my grandmother that family things had a start time of an hour earlier than they really were (and she would still be at least 45 minutes late).

I did that for my graduation dinner, made the res for nine but told everyone 8:30. We made it on time, just.

My mom used to be bad about that (she believed if a wedding invitation said "ceremony at 5:00," it was totally fine to be pulling into the church parking lot at 5:05. Got to love walking in *after* the bride.

I think my extremely anal stepdad cured her of that.