Parenting | Life

I’m a Recovering Perfectionist. My Children Are Helping Me Reframe My Ideas About Success.

It’s still very much a work in progress

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Maybe there’s something to be said for doing just enough.

It’s taken me a solid 40 years to reach this realization, and I’m not sure I fully believe it yet, but I’m getting there. Slowly. Day by day and pointless elementary school homework assignment by pointless elementary school homework assignment.

I don’t know when I started caring deeply about perfection but I know it was very early. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t obsess over getting 100s on tests at school or playing a game of baseball without making a mistake. I vividly remember in sixth grade, sitting at my little elementary school desk with the cubby hole under the writing surface where you crammed books, papers, and pencils, tears beginning to well up in my eyes as I slowly realized I had made the gravest of errors. It was a truly unforgivable mistake.

The class had completed some sort of quiz or test. The teacher instructed us to exchange papers with another student and then she went through the answers while we graded the other person’s paper. In retrospect, this seems like an unnecessarily cruel and public way to grade an assignment, but there were no considerations for children’s feelings back in the late 1900s. After the teacher read off the first couple of answers, the girl grading my paper looked perplexed.

She raised her hand and explained what I had done. I don’t remember what it was that I had done, exactly, but I know I messed it all up… terribly. I think I must’ve misread the instructions or something so the bottom line was that all my answers were wrong. A clear F. Failure. Or rather, H for humiliation.

The girl, who just so happened to be very cute and nice and popular (that didn’t help matters), looked at me with concern in her eyes. Of course, her face was starting to look a little watery from my perspective. Almost as blurry as if I’d taken off my Coke bottle eyeglasses. I immediately attempted damage control because the first thing every perfectionist learns is that you have to hide your perfectionism at all…