Ministers Musings
The Art of Imperfection
Rev. Lydia Ferrante-Roseberry
May 11, 2008 Boulder Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
“There is in all of us, a place of pure perfection”.
I love that sentiment. Maybe I’ll find mine after I find all my mismatched socks!
A couple of weeks ago, the day after returning from our vacation, Phil and I spent Sunday preparing to get back into our routine. Talia, our six-year-old, wanted to bring pictures from our trip to school – so we got those off the camera and printed. She wanted to clear the shells we’d found on the beach, so we did that. We did laundry, and got her back-pack ready.
On Monday morning, we all woke up early – coffee and tea were made, along with oatmeal and waffles for the kids. Talia was being rushed along to get dressed and brush her teeth in time for the 7:30 bus. At about 7:15, as I was putting her snack into her backpack, I stopped and looked at a piece of paper that had come from the school.
Huh, Talia didn’t have school on the Friday we were away. That’s interesting, I thought. Then a distant memory of perhaps another piece of paper among the many that come from her school came to mind.
I dashed to the school district website and my fears were confirmed –Talia didn’t have school this particular Monday either. Or Tuesday for that matter. All the preparation, all the rushing, the plans Phil and I had for our day together – all that was for naught. I was only grateful we hadn’t gone as far as to have her standing outside waiting for the bus!
Oh, to be flawless! I carry an ideal in my head of what it would feel like to not make mistakes – to not forget these “little” things, like my child’s school schedule, to not arrive in the pulpit with random pages of my sermon that didn’t print, as happened a few months ago, to not look down during a meeting and see my son’s fingerprints in jelly stains on my pants. Somehow, my young adult self would not have imagined that the details of my now mid-life self would be so messy!
Perfectionism – the belief that the ideal of something perfect can and should be attained — holds a big appeal in our culture. Just take a look at magazine racks and you’ll see. “The Search for the “Perfect” guy “How to get ‘perfect’ abs”, the “perfect” home, or have the ‘perfect’ family vacation. I think that’s the one where the kids get along every moment and no one throws up on the car ride!
More and more TV shows are focusing on fixing our ‘imperfections’ – think about “The Swan”, and “Extreme Makeover” both of which take self-identified ‘ugly ducklings’ and transform their bodies, their homes and supposedly their lives.
Our cultural obsession with perfection can be traced to our Puritanical roots. The energy that formed this country was an energy that believed that we, humanity, are forever imperfect in God’s eyes, depraved, and in need of reform. Many theological shifts have occurred over time, but a cultural theme of perfectionist tendencies remain. The founding fathers grounded the possibility of perfection in a system of checks and balances, as I mentioned last week, when talking about the roots of humanism. A generation later, the Transcendentalists believed that individual perfection existed, and through it, so could the perfection of society. Octavius Frothingham described the Transcendentalist as “less a reformer of human circumstances than a regenerator of the human spirit.” There’s that pure perfection inside us that Margaret Wheatley alluded to.
“Flawless” by Margaret Wheatley
For too many years
I have wanted to be flawless,
Perfecting my pursuits,
I bargained all for love.
For all these many years
I’ve made masks of my own doing,
Pursuing my perfection,
I found I was pursued.
And then
one day
I fell
sprawled
flattened
lost
on the fertile ground of self.
Naked in dirt
no mask
no bargains
I raised my soiled face
and there
you were.
I struggled to stand.
Dirt from my body
clouded your eyes.
Your hand reached
for me.
Blinded,
your
hand
reached
me.
There is, in all of us, a place of pure perfection.
We discover its geography together.
What do we gain from our perfectionist inclinations? A lot, to be sure. Healthy perfectionism is achievement oriented. An ideal is seen, often beyond what currently exists, and it can become a wonderful challenge to attain. Perfectionists have high standards, and work hard to achieve them. They are the reformers, who bring about needed change with their keen eye for ‘what’s not working’.
But perfectionism can be unrelenting. The gap between what ‘could be’ and ‘what is’ never seems to close. The Perfectionist can feel frustrated by their own and others flawed attempts to meet the ideal.
Perfectionism unchecked can lead to anger and depression, as the perfectionist lives in a world, and with people who never quite live up to their expectations. Inner oriented perfectionists can become their own worst critic. Outer-oriented perfectionists can be a bear to live with!
Perfectionism can lead to a narrowing of possibilities and creativity, as an ideal gets set in stone, or the perfect system created, leaving no room for unexpected gifts and surprises.
How do you know if you are going over-board — if your inner sense of quality is becoming obsessive? I’d say, if getting ‘a job well done’ stops bringing you joy! Or, if you find yourself stressed by lots of little things –that is if you find yourself missing the forest for the trees.
Another good way is to pay attention to how you feel and act toward those around you, especially those you love. Are they never quite measuring up? It might be an indication to put down your yardstick.
Mothering, and parenting in general, is a most natural place to hang our perfectionist tendencies. The internal and external pressures to ‘want the best’ for our children are huge. And the contradictory list of ‘shoulds’ for parents, especially parents of young kids is overwhelming! Just scan the parenting section of any bookstore and it will make your head spin!
I remember reading baby books that basically declared that if my child did not sleep in the same bed with us, she’d forever have attachment issues. These books were, of course next to the ones that declared equally emphatically that if I didn’t train my daughter to sleep independently by the time she was three months old, she’d never become an independent adult! I wound up feeling that if I didn’t get this one part of my child’s early development ‘right’, she’d be a failure for life. It took me years to let go of that one. Recently, I’ve created my own mantra about my family and sleep: Do whatever gets the most people the most sleep with the least stress.
In the early 1950s, psychologist Donald Winnicott coined the term ‘the good-enough mother’. This mother he contrasted to the ‘perfect mother’ who met all of her child’s needs and instantly. The “good-enough mother’, instead, is astutely tuned into its child and holds back on satisfying some of its needs to enable that child to further in its natural developmental course. You can easily see, however, that one can strive to actually be a ‘perfect’ good-enough mother.
Winnicott’s ‘flaw’ we might say, was corrected by Bruno Bettelhiem, who wrote “The Good Enough Parent” in 1988.
He writes:
In order to raise a child well, one ought not to try to be a perfect parent, as much as one should not expect one’s child to be, or to become, a perfect individual. Perfection is not within the grasp of ordinary human beings. Efforts to attain it typically interfere with that lenient response to the imperfections of others, including those of one’s child, which also make good human relations possible.
But it is quite possible to be a good enough parent — that is, a parent who raises his child well. To achieve this, the mistakes we make in rearing our child — errors often made just because of the intensity of our emotional involvement in and with our child, must be more than overcompensated for by the many instances in which we do right by our child.
More recently, internationally renowned child psychiatrist, Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, coined the term hyper-parenting to describe the seemingly American phenomenon of micromanagement in parenting. Parents are deluding themselves, [he says] into overestimating their impact on their children’s development and success or failure in sports, academia and musical aptitude. http://www.mommybloggers.com/2006/03/the_goodenough_mother.html
Or as a ‘mommy-blogger’ recently wrote:
It’s unlikely that Abraham Lincoln’s parents pushed him to join junior toastmasters. Do you think Bob Dylan’s mommy took him to early childhood education music class? Yeah, I didn’t think so. http://www.mommybloggers.com/2006/03/the_goodenough_mother.html
What concerns me is not that we want the best for our kids, or even that we all think that our kids are the best, but that we create a level of anxiety and stress for ourselves along the way. Because, really, aside from the margins of parenting that fall into the category of abuse and neglect – most kids are quite resilient and survive their parent’s short-comings. Can we trust our children enough to believe that they will forgive us for our mistakes and move on to live happy, fulfilled lives?
Let’s face it, parents today face their own unique sets of demands – role expectations have changed, and so has the economy. School expectations for our kids have changed, and so has our work outside the sphere of parenting. It’s not easy and, like every generation, what our parents did may no longer fit our particular situation. So when I see parents, myself included, stressing out over after school activities or non-organic snacks, I wonder about the impact of that constant pressure to do it ‘just right’ has on the soul. Because really, we are operating here around the margins of excellence by most standards. What’s the fear behind it? Where is the place that we can just rest and trust that it will be all right?
How do we counter-act the unhealthy parts of this cultural propensity for perfection?
My prayer for us is simply “ease”. My desire is that all of us who struggle with the pull toward perfectionism – who want to do it just right for our children, or our Fellowship, or our world, practice the Art of Imperfection.
What might that look like?
First and foremost, I believe, is being gentle with ourselves. It’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy of all the things we are supposed to do, especially as moms. Know your limitations, accept them, and even love them.
Second, try to keep it all in perspective – don’t sweat the small stuff – as the saying goes. Trust that you are doing the best you can, and so are others, and that that is, in fact, good enough.
Third, adopt an attitude of experimentation – Let this quote from writer Ray Bradbury live with you for a few days: “Life is trying things out to see if they work”. See how that feels.
Seek joy, laughter and connection – imagine measuring your day by how many times you laughed, even at yourself, versus how many things you accomplished.
And, finally, forgive yourself and others for all the ways that you don’t do it ‘right’. In the end, that may be the biggest gift we give ourselves, our children and our world.
But whatever you do, please practice even this art, imperfectly!
Let us sing together a song of compassion.