cat named pig

I admit it. I have a problem: I want to do everything right. Not just right, but flawlessly, excellently. I want to reinvent the very concept of whatever it is I’m working on, so people around me will pause, amazed, to think wow, what she does has totally changed everything I ever thought about parenting [or writing an annual report, or whatever the task in question may be]. In other words, I tend to set really small, manageable expectations for myself.

Needless to say, the only outcome I have ever experienced as a result of this sort of thinking involves disappointment. Lots and lots of disappointment. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better about handling the disappointment — I’ve developed strategies for avoiding it.

Strategy #1: Not Trying. If you’re not trying, it doesn’t matter if you fail to achieve excellence in a particular area. You can simply decide that something (having a clean house for example, not that I’m speaking from experience or anything here) is not Important. Then you don’t have to feel bad about the stacks of unsorted paper that sit so long they need to be dusted before you can actually sort them move them from one corner of your bedroom to another. You don’t have to berate yourself when large tumbleweeds of cat hair drift across the desert living room floor while you check your e-mail.

This strategy works pretty well as long as no one comes over.

Strategy #2: I Don’t Have Enough Time. This is similar to Strategy #1, in that I can employ it to avoid feeling disappointed in myself. If something is not perfect, not the best ever of its kind, it’s not my fault because I only had a tiny bit of time to work on it. It’s not like I tried my hardest and did absolutely everything I could and it still wasn’t perfect. That would be failure. But something that turns out halfway decent, given the time constraints, well, that’s not so bad. And you can take this strategy a step further by procrastinating, thereby ensuring that you will have limited time to complete the task. Genius.

Between deciding certain things don’t matter and procrastinating on the things that do matter until I just barely get them done, I can almost get by without having to beat myself up in my head. Almost.

But it has recently come to my attention that this is not how I want to live the rest of my life. The combination of avoiding certain things altogether because it might not be possible to do them flawlessly and the procrastination-freak-out-panic cycle is possibly not the healthiest. And it is certainly not the example I want to model for my kids.

What brought this to my attention? Well, the procrastination-induced sobbing fits and never-being-good-enough self-loathing aside, it was really when I saw Siena crumple her drawing and hurl it to the floor in tears because she had written one letter wrong as I helped her spell something. She stormed into her room and threw herself on the bed in tears.

“I’m never writing or doing that stupid drawing AGAIN!”

Umm.

Kind of like how I swear I’m never taking on another project like this AGAIN, every time I have any kind of deadline? Kind of like how I thought even a part-time job was incompatible with parenthood, because my performance was not up to my mental standard in either? Kind of like how I never think I should apply for a job if I have not done that exact thing (successfully) before, because the WORST THING EVER would be to get the job and not be AMAZING at it?

Yeah.

Time for both of us to make some changes.