Ode to the Perfectionist Mother

Years ago I printed out a poem that spoke of the beauty of having kids and their accompanying joyful noise. The author wrote about blank patches in his lawn due to their exuberant play, and it stuck in my mind because I can relate to a less-than-perfect yard. 

I can relate to a lot of less-than-perfect everything. 

I suspect that your perfectionism might have started out much like mine, though, if in fact perfectionism is a thorn in your side, too? We hear the well-intentioned praise of others when we do something right or to their liking as a child, and that inner dial clicks on that tells us, "If I make this perfect, I will gain approval." 

Or maybe it's an inner drive you've fought your whole life. Some of us are simply wired this way.

But along comes that precious little baby, and before we can even hold tiny him or her in our arms, our perfectly crafted birth plan is tossed out the window as pretty much nothing in labor goes the way we pictured it. The first obstetrician I ever had told me after she broke the news that she wouldn't be delivering my baby, "Honey, when you're in labor, you won't care if the janitor delivers you."

Goodbye, perfect beginning to motherhood. 

(If we want to split hairs, my perfect motherhood was shattered the first time I threw up so violently from morning sickness, every blood vessel around my eyes burst into beautiful red lines that made me look I'd been smoking crack.)

After the first few months with darling newborn, life recalibrates and we begin to believe we have this all under control again. Some of us have two perfectly behaved children in a row with no medical issues, learning disabilities, or cowlicks. We believe that we have crafted lovely children by wielding our parenting skills we learned from the experts who wrote a book.

But some of us have children with mental illness diagnoses, disgusting habits like spitting loogies and chewing fingernails until they bleed, endless potty training sessions that result in underwear we just throw away because it's easier to buy a package of 4 + the bonus 1 from WalMart, inappropriate comments said aloud to the pastor, and terrible handwriting. 

Our perfect family is shattered.

Rather, our idea of what a perfect family looks like is shattered. Remembering the difference between the two is what will keep us from regret and disappointment, because first of all, there is no perfect family. 

Secondly, it's far easier to face the truth that we had a picture in our minds of how this would go, and heck, life happened! Things didn't go as planned! This happens to me pretty nearly every time I make dinner, so it's a concept I can easily grasp. 

Life almost never goes the way we think it should in our heads.

The picture at the top of this post is of our home. When we moved in four weeks ago, there was grass all around the tree, but the tree had an old swing hidden up in its branches and our kids spotted it like a hawk spies a chihuahua from 50 yards. I think it has a homing device inside its seat, too, because suddenly the kids from across the street, and catty-corner, and across the alley quickly made their way over to the swing and I think we gained two extra little girls at our house in the process.

Goodbye, lawn. Hello, dirt patch carefully constructed by feet dragging across and around and across and around again. 

My lawn isn't perfect. You should see the inside of my house. Oh, we keep it up and clean it and hang paintings and wash the slipcovers, but children live there. Homeschooled children who never leave, do not pack a lunch that gets left on the bus, and craft every science experiment in the kitchen using the same liquid measuring cup that I'll wash and repurpose for actual food preparation in a few hours. 

It isn't perfect, but this once-perfectionist mother has learned to see the beauty and peace that accompanies allowing life to take its course. Every once in awhile it's okay to perfection yourself to the point of frustration, but as the old adage so wisely reminds, choose your battles carefully. A flawed platter of cupcakes made with laughter and a not-quite-perfect shade of green food coloring trumps the three-layer chocolate Taj Mahal replica that forced everyone "out of the kitchen or die" any day.

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Mothers Be Good to Your Daughters

She sat in the chair next to me in the salon, the ends of her long hair wrapped in foil to absorb the bleach that would be the base for magenta tips. She was young — 18 — and her attention was on the small screen she held in her hand, a smile slowly appearing on her face as she responded to whomever was on the other end. When the stylist inquired about school or work or boyfriend, she readily entered into conversation, polite, cheerful, engaged.

The bell on the door clanged against the glass as a woman my age pushed through. She addressed the girl with the kind of familiarity that bypasses social conventions, cutting straight to the point like a laser beam. “How long is this going to take?”, she barked, then glanced around at the other women like me in the room before taking her annoyance down a socially acceptable notch. “How much is this going to cost me?”

I couldn’t hear the girl’s response, but she looked up at her mother to meet her gaze, quietly answering the questions and putting out the small smoldering flicker with her own calculated calm. She’d had to respond this way before.

The questions continued. “Who are you going out with tonight? Are you going after work?” She wasn’t asking because she cared in the way friends ask, “Hey, what’s going on with you?” She was shooting fiery darts meant to pin the young woman-daughter to the wall. There was a tense edge in the salon that hadn’t been there just a minute before she broke the calm with her irritated voice.

And it made me ponder my relationship with my own three daughters. Mine aren’t yet legally adults, but they are fast approaching 18. I can confidently assert from my current vantage point that we have a strong mother-daughter relationship. Note here that I also have three adult sons, and while I have a great relationship with all three, I’ve been around the parenting block long enough to know that relationships are fluid, living entities, and as such can morph into stressful or less-loving seasons. I don’t pretend to have this sewn up.

But this I do know: 12-year-old girls can be frustrating. Stifling. Or in the words of a friend raising her own teen girls, “Like a booger you can’t flick off.” That sums it up. My 12-year-old is all up in my business all the time. All the time. Right now every day is an opportunity to use my workplace polite and patient voice with her — the voice you use with co-workers you need to tolerate and work with everyday and better not offend or risk having your lunch stolen from the communal fridge or your name dropped at the water cooler. If I can drum that up for them, why not for my own flesh and blood?

Sometimes when we choose to be polite, we come out on the other side with a greater understanding of what might be making that person such an irritant. In the case of pre-teen girls, that irritation tends to stem from a lack of maturity and a surge of hormones, neither of which they can control. If I take a deep breath when my preteen is doing her own breathing down my neck, pestering me with questions of who, what, why, where, and when (as in, “Who called you? What did they want? Why are you doing that? Where are you going? and When will you be back?”), I can absorb the annoyance and be kind. Kindness covers a multitude of annoyances.

Love covers a multitude of sins, and mothers of teens and preteen daughters, listen: snippy, unkind, disrespectful responses to our daughters are sin. Cover that stuff with love. Someday soon those 12-year-old boogers will be 18-year-olds in salon chairs beautifying themselves and still hoping your smile of approval means something. What you sow at 8, 10, and 12 can be reaped at 16, 18, and 20. Sow love, reap love. Mothers, be good to your daughters.

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