The Lure of 100%

You'll be happy to know that even though I've had a long six month break from blogging, I'm returning just as neurotic as ever.  And to prove it, I'm going to show you just how nuts I can get about perfectionism.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that perfection is a dangerous plaything.  It's a shiny bauble that the three-year-old in me is always reaching for, tempting me with its beauty and elusiveness, convincing me that once I have it in my greedy hands I'll be well and truly happy.  Being aware of the truth of perfection is possibly the only thing that keeps me from diving headlong into the pursuit of perfection with abandon.  Reality keeps me grounded, at least to a certain extent.

The problem is those rare occasions when something presents itself in which perfection is attainable.  I know I'll never be the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect Mormon or Republican or Whack-a-mole player.  All of those things are subjective, and perfection isn't possible.  But if achievements can be quantified or measured against an absolute, then maybe a person can be perfect.  You know where I see this in my life?  School.

School, with its multiple choices, true/false tests, grade point averages and SAT scores, is my perfectionist's nirvana.  Every day I have the chance to turn in a piece of homework or take a quiz and get in return a piece of validation.  There is nothing that thrills me more than seeing a paper declaring "100%" or, less clinically, "A+."  You may as well slap a gold star on my forehead, it makes me that happy.

My adolescent lit professor made the mistake of indulging in my fantasy of getting a 100% not just on one test, but in an entire class.  She was an extremely liberal grader - every paper or project we turned in would get 100% if the requirements were met, but any bit of creativity that was above and beyond the requirements would earn extra credit.  I figured that a little bit of extra effort would put me on easy street for the class, and it did.  By the end, my grade was over 100%.  It's no wonder that this was one of my favorite classes ever.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to replicate my feat in any other class, and even though I know I am being completely unreasonable, I still go into every new semester thinking that this class I'll ace.

Yeah, I know, I'm messed up.

I learned that lesson in school, too.  My American Lit class was discussing something off-topic, I don't remember what, but I mentioned that I put my A papers on my refrigerator, just like my kids' good grades.  The teacher stared at me and said, "You don't really do that, do you?"  Well, if backwards bicycling was an Olympic sport, I would have qualified right then for how fast I backpedaled.  "Oh, no, I was just joking," I assured her, realizing for the first time that not everybody takes their grades as a measure of self-worth.

Today I'm shaking off the lure of 100%.  I'm working on a group project with two other classmates (aside- I am convinced that people in Hell always have to work in groups.  Or on committees.)  I'm already feeling antsy about the outcome of the project, since I'm not convinced that everyone is on the same page as to what the teacher is asking of us.  Then yesterday, I forfeited my assignment, putting together a slideshow of Vietnam War photos (which would take maybe an hour to do, tops), and instead took on the writing assignment, which is definitely the harder part.  Why?  Because I got a 95 on the midterm paper, and the girl who was originally going to write only got a 91.  Now I'm seeing the emailed slideshow that this girl is putting together and I'm tempted to polish it up a little, you know, tweak it here and there to improve it.  Why? BECAUSE I AM A CRAZY PERSON.  And a control freak.  And completely unable to even fathom the idea of getting anything less than an A on a project with my name on it.

Someone needs to help me.  Seriously.  Maybe I need to take a super hard class and fail utterly so that I learn that failure is not so bad.  Maybe I need to quit school and move to a Zen monastery where I can learn how to live in the moment and embrace pain and what not.  Although, knowing me, I'd be waiting for the monk in charge to give me a silent nod of approval at my excellent lotus position, which is at least 4% better than my Zen-mate's.

I definitely have a problem.

Camping, Day One

We got a later start than I expected.  Much later.  I got home from school at 2:30, figured we'd pack and throw our stuff in the car and hit the open road by, say, 3:30.  What I didn't count on was that packing for a campout requires roughly 200 more items than packing for a hotel trip.  I consider myself something of a packing expert (for my family, at least.)  I had trial packing runs before our trip to Europe.  If anything, I tend to overpack rather than underpack.  Not so this time.  In fact, it is likely that I have dangerously underpacked, even though our minivan was so full it was bulging like a cartoon drawing of a stuffed minivan would be.

The problem with camping is that you need to pack a duplicate of every single useful item in your house including, but not limited to, furniture, bedding, kitchen appliances, and the entertainment center.  Random items that aren't useful in regular life become essential.  Take, for instance, matches.  I use them six times a year, to light birthday candles.  Our family could conceivably survive just fine on a single matchbook for the entire year.  In contrast, Brad used a match for every man, woman, and child in Utah trying to light our campfire tonight.

The campfire, by the way, was a heroic moment for Brad.  Considering the last time I was involved with campfire-making was when I went to Girl's Camp in 1992, we called upon our current Scouter to get our fire going.  He built a nice stack of kindling and lit it, but it went out.  The next match too.  And on, I won't get into the tedious details here.  At some point, he gave up, but I could see there were some decent embers underneath the whole thing.  Using the elite campfire-making skills I learned watching Survivor, I blew on the pile of smoldering sticks.  After about a minute of blowing, the whole stack exploded into flames!  The kids started cheering and Brad went back to work, piling more wood in a careful array.  I was so happy he could have his moment.  If we could have, we would have put him on our shoulders and marched him around the campground, we were so proud of him.

I'm excited about the trip so far, but considering that it's 10:48 p.m. right now and three of the four kids are still awake (and complaining about the snoring of the fourth) I'm apprehensive.  Bad sleep is never a good thing in our family.  Here are some memorable moments so far:

What's your favorite thing so far?

Zack: Playing the wii.

Me:  I meant camping.

Zack:  Oh, then, the playground.

Noah walks out in pajama pants and no shirt.  He is a younger version of Axl from "The Middle" - the teenage boy who wears just his boxers all day long. I said, "Noah, I told you to pack WARM pajamas." Noah, pointing to his pants:  "These ARE warm."

Bug Count:

3 gnats orbiting my head at the playground

1 anonymous possible bug that fell out of a tree and hit Ryan on the head

Things I've Forgotten To Bring:

Pocket knife

Cold cereal (Did not forget the milk, bowls, spoon)

Garbage bags

Zack's coat

Babies Don't Keep

Darcey, at age 2-and-eleven/twelfths, is still sleeping in a crib.  She is quite verbose now, which means that at 8:30 I hear, "Mom!  Wake up!  Get me out of here!" which always makes me chuckle.  Today I picked her up and was rewarded with a rare moment of cuddling.  She laid her head on my shoulder and I rocked her back and forth.  Now, chances are she was just using the height advantage to survey the vast pink wasteland that is her bedroom floor, a suspicion that was confirmed when she got down and immediately used Minnie Mouse's head as a chalkboard eraser.  But it doesn't take away that moment of pure, simple joy of holding my daughter.

I've been trying hard this week to notice the moments and appreciate them, those tiny snapshots of perfection that seem to be all older people remember when they think fondly back on their child-rearing days.  It's been easier than I expected, but I attribute that to the absolutely wonderful week I've had, emotionally speaking.  I have felt so even-keeled that I almost forget that I'm on a boat and there still could be rough seas ahead.  (This good week brought to you by GlaxoSmithKline.)  So I'm shutting my laptop more often when a kid is in the room with me, putting down the morning paper when Zack is getting ready for school, keeping the radio off when I'm driving the boys somewhere.  Not all the time, of course, but a little more than before.

In my house growing up there was a needlepoint hung on the wall that had a picture of a mother rocking a baby and it said:

Cleaning and scrubbing can wait til tomorrow

For babies grow up, we've learned to our sorrow.

So quiet down cobwebs, and dust go to sleep,

I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.

As I held my last baby this morning, I was conscious of the fact that I can no longer hold her brothers the way I hold her.  That part is over, and it soon will be with Darcey as well.  Have I paid enough attention to the moments?  Can I remember what each of their snuggly little bodies felt like?  I catalog all of the failures and the crises and the wish-this-were-overs; my only hope is that when I'm an old lady my selective memory will cobble together a picture of all the moments of perfection and love and joy.

I believe I will.  I believe that all of us mothers that are in the crucible of child-rearing are doing better than we think.  I believe that our kids see through the mistakes and the frustrations and know that they are loved, and that at the end of the day, that's what counts.  Not how clean our house is, or how much they enjoyed our dinners, or how much baby weight we still carry.  When Brad brings me home my daily flower he's picked off the blossoming trees, it's not to thank me for helping him with his homework.  When Noah gives me spontaneous hugs, it's not because I always know where he left his baseball glove.  We judge ourselves so much about what we do as mothers, but fail to realize that all that matters to our kids is that we love them.  That is what we are as mothers - we are love personified.

So as Mother's Day comes up, that most loved and loathed holiday, let yourself off the hook for all of the things you don't do.  Take a small step towards appreciating the moments more.  And if you'll indulge me, here's a modern woman's needlepoint:

T.V. and iPods can wait til tomorrow

For babies grow up, we've learned to our sorrow.

So quiet down Facebook, phone go to sleep,

I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.

A Farewell to Four-Eyes

I'm doing it.  I'm finally getting Lasik.  By the time you read this, I'll be laying on a table with my eyelids taped open, being forced to stare at a light on the ceiling while a laser slices off my cornea.  While this sounds like a scene from a James Bond film, or possibly the latest torture cooked up by the guys at Gitmo, in fact, I am paying big bucks for this kind of treatment.  We'll find out in a day or so if it's worth it.

I've had a love/hate relationship with my glasses.  Okay, it's more like hate/hate with a dash of well, at least I'm not blind thrown in.  I got my first pair of glasses in third grade.  I was eight, and that same year I also got braces, the kind of double-whammy of ugliness whose sole purpose is to "build character."  I don't remember having that "Look!  I can see the leaves on the trees!" kind of experience when I first got glasses.  In fact, I remember quite clearly leaving them on the windowsill many mornings, causing my teacher to scold me and move me to the front of the classroom.  Apparently I didn't think I was missing much without my glasses.

My glasses didn't have a huge emotional impact on me at the time.  Their effects grew as I got older and kids got meaner.  In elementary school, I was bursting with self-confidence:  to illustrate, in fifth grade I determined (through what evidence I have no idea) that I was the third most popular girl in my class, after Alicia and Nicole.  Alicia moved, though, and I got bumped to the number two spot.  If we hadn't moved to Eldersburg at the end of the year, who knows how popular I would have been?  I was on the fast track to popularity.  I could have been somebody!  I could have been a contender!

But we did move, and my glasses were a prominent part of the instant judgment passed by my new classmates on my first day of school.  As stereotypes go, glasses=smart is not a horribly painful one, but since smart=nerd=dork=victim, you can imagine it wasn't the ideal stereotype heading into middle school.  Oh, and middle school was brutal.  Not all of it, but the bus rides, oh the bus rides.  Why on earth would any adult think its a good idea to cram sixty kids into a bus with no supervision other than the driver who could never possibly see what's going on in the way back where the scary kids sat?  To this day, I prefer to sit up front, near the driver, out of sheer self-preservation.

The glasses-as-target trend faded in high school, for the most part, with a few rather painful exceptions that I thought about disclosing here but won't because, really, they still hurt.  Glasses-as-smart was something I have (rather obviously) internalized.  Being considered "smart" is such a key part of my identity - would that be true if it hadn't been for the 4.0 assumptions made about me in school?  (Which, for the record, I never had, nor did I ever provide my father with his oft-dreamed about "My child is on the honor roll at Liberty High School" bumper sticker.)

They say that the eyes are the window to the soul.  If that's true, then glasses are the sheer curtains people put up for privacy.  Honestly, there is something about glasses that shrank me, made me withdraw behind the protective plexiglass shield in front of my eyes.  I was always aware of them, always self-conscious and, to be blunt, convinced I was unattractive because I wore glasses.  Well, maybe less attractive is a better way to state it.  I know exactly how much my glasses held me back in high school because after I graduated and moved to California, I bought contact lenses and my world changed.  Not only did I see the world differently (three cheers for peripheral vision!) but I found this well of confidence that I didn't know had been dry all these years.  I changed the way I looked on the outside, but the real change happened inside.

Fast forward nine years to 2003.  We had moved to Utah, I had two kids and a horrible case of dry eyes from the desert air.  I abandoned the contacts for glasses again, and at the time it didn't seem like too big a deal.  I was tired of the routine and the work involved in contacts, and since I had already used my feminine wiles to secure a husband, contacts no longer seemed as vital to my self-esteem.  I've been back in glasses for seven years and can barely remember what it was like to be glasses-less anymore.  Ryan has been suggesting Lasik for years now, ever since he got bait-and-switched, but I've been reluctant.  First, I had to wait until I was done having kids, because what's the point of fixing my vision only to have pregnancy screw it up again?  Then, it was fear, because nothing says "bad idea" like "slicing open your cornea."  The thought of whatever they're going to do to keep my eyelids open is enough to get my stomach churning.  (I'm picturing tape, Ryan's picturing toothpicks thanks to a Tom and Jerry cartoon.)  I've reached the point where the perceived benefits outweigh the fear, and that is why I am going under the knife, er, laser today.

I don't know what my reaction is going to be when I'm done with the surgery.  Will I cry with joy?  Will I undergo another reinvention of my self-image?  Will it even work?  (I have very thin corneas, the only part of me that is too thin, of course.)  I don't know.  I know this, though - I won't miss my glasses, not even for one single second.