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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
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…
