The Problem With Perfect

I've been hard on myself lately.  Really hard.  It's not anything new.  I feel it creeping up, the pressure, and I know I need to go easier, softer, that there is no prize for perfection.  But still.  The problem with being a perfectionist, type-A, whatever the label, is that the goal you are pushing so hard for doesn't exist.  It's an illusion created in your mind that ignites an inner critic that is impossible to please.  Being enough is never enough.  Give your 3 year-old a donut on the way to school?  Really should be more careful with her health.  Inviting friends over for dinner?  The state of this house is an embarrassment.  Last minute dinner with your husband?  As if you should really be seen in public looking the way you do right now.

I spent the ride to the apple orchard today listening to the unrelenting internal dialogue.  Waves of everything I do wrong washing away everything I do right.

That inner critic is at once like nails on a chalk board and a familiar friend.  I can't anymore turn it off as I could change my eye color.  It's a part of who I am, maybe not my best part, but still a big one, and if there is one thing I am learning in this life, it's that ignoring any part of yourself, diminishing your parts and your make up, serves no purpose.  Learning to love yourself means seeing yourself stripped bare and loving the messy, broken parts with the same intensity instilled in the love offered to the easier, softer ones.  Maybe even with more intensity.  Because forgiving inwards holds the same amount of grace as forgiving outwards.

I can't stop the critique,  I'm not really even sure I know how to make my inner voice softer, kinder.  It's a work in progress, like every other part of learning and growing.  I know I don't want my girls to hear their inner voice rise to the pitch of perfectionism.  I know I can't guide them to soft voices with a narrative riddled with self-loathing and judgement for failing to make an impossible mark.  It's hard to shake it off and get back to being present in my own life, their lives.

I'm learning.  I know that the best way forward sometimes is simply to show up, and keep doing, keep creating, keep loving.  Eventually, the loving always quiets the critic.  Loving, like laughter, heals.  Giving honest love and accepting it back only happens in the absolute absence of perfection.  I'm not there yet, but I am pushing forward past the illusion, to the soft, yielding place where the critics fall silent.  I watched my babies run through the orchard today, selecting their fruit with no weight given towards perfection.  Smooth, perfect skins never offering the guarantee of sweet fruit.

Hard

Today was just hard.  Sometimes the waves of parenting are unrelenting.  They crash and slam against the rocky ledges you spent years shoring up to ensure your own survival.  I can't count the number of times today I cringed at the sounds of my own voice.  The nagging in it, the pitch, the frantic crisis of missing diddys and bubbas.  The curt threatening of beloved toys being snatched from you for the littlest of infractions.  The exhaustion of it.  The honest exhaustion of it.  The exhaustion.

Your daddy works hard my loves.  He works honest, hard, long days.  Sometimes I admire them and sometimes I resent them.  There are even times I envy them.  56 renditions into 'Tomorrow' (The theme song of the musical Annie and your first true obsession Harps) and I am begging for a nap to overcome you so I can drift into some desperate solitude.  Sometimes loves, it is hard to untangle the sound of my own voice from the chaos of loving and caring for you.

I rushed you to your tub tonight.  I remember a woman once telling me when you have a crab to put it in water and I look forward to the calm that comes from your tubs.   Tonight it didn't work.  An hour later and we were still a mess of little bodies struggling to find rest, your mama running the next day's routines over and over in my head.  It doesn't always need to work loves. and you don't need to always have answers.  Sometimes a good bath and a little contemplation is just that.

The Fall Cleansing

I've always found the fall cleansing.  Fresh starts come with cooler air.  We're settling into new routines around here, stretching and growing with each school morning, the drop of backpacks in the afternoon and little girls who never stop exploring.

Adventure can be found without traveling very far when you're little.  Walks with Daddy, fall leaves, pink hair for breast cancer awareness and that cleansing fall air.

Parenting.

Parenting.  It's overwhelming at times.  A lot of my days lately have alternated between 'I'm going to stick a red hot poker in my eye if I hear WHY one more time' and 'There is no way, in the history of people, that anyone has had to endure 5AM wake ups calls for THIS LONG.EVER'

Which leads us to my new favorite Sunday morning game.  Stay trapped together in Harpo's crib and pretend you are Rapunzel and Baby Rapunzel.  What?  There is no Baby Rapunzel???  There is now my little friends.  Practice patience waiting for the prince to save you while Mama sits still half asleep in the rocker and nurses her coffee.  Because she NEEDS the coffee.  Like, to SURVIVE.

And then, just when you are contemplating how expensive it could possibly be to have coffee and red wine shipped directly to your home non-stop so that you can endure, they bring you to church.  They stop the tireless fight, the tantrums and the back talk just long enough to let their innocence, their love, their unconditional love and their sweet softness wash over you and remind you of what's important.  You're all they have, all they know, and you wouldn't have it any other way.  They bring you to their very own state of grace.  Church.