Remember what it felt like as a child before you understood your own limitations? Thankfully for those of us with a good upbringing and caring parents and teachers, we were surrounded with the philosophy that anything is possible. For some weird reason, I was obsessed with being an astronaut in 4th grade. I forced my family to go to Huntsville, Alabama to see the rockets. I built my own little space shuttle out of cardboard in the back yard. I watched "Space Camp" constantly. Of course NASA would have a system failure and launch a space shuttle with 5 kids under 18. Completely logical. Somewhere down the line, I found out that most astronauts had aerospace engineering degrees and were fighter jet pilots. And like 20 people are ever chosen. Hmmm... I'm really bad at math and have awful motion sickness. I can't be an astronaut! It was the dawn of realizing that you can't be everything you want to be EVEN if you tried hard enough.I kind of continued to lie to myself in high school and college about math and chemistry. I didn't try hard so that's why I did so bad. If I had actually tried, I would have done fine.
Law school finally reinforced the "hard work doesn't get you everything you want" philosophy. Certain professors were rumored to toss exams down the stairs and assign random grades. In college, you could study really hard and get awesome grades. In law school, you can study really hard and be average. There were the lottery classes where I miraculously got good grades despite not understanding anything beyond memorized test questions. An A in Evidence??! I'll take it. :) Or when I got lucky and read about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act before my business organizations exam because our libertarian professor was going nuts about the new regulations. It ended up being about a third of the test. I think that is why law school is so hard on perfectionists. You don't have control of your academics above a certain threshold.
And now to the ultimate hard working/can't make everything perfect situation. Motherhood! Every few weeks, I have so had it with the crying, whining, and my monotonous routine that I turn into a total monster. It slightly is affected by hormones (ha) but it rears its ugly head and Nate orders me out of the house for his sanity. I'm an awful little kid in these moments and have to go get some form of sugar to calm me down. I had such a moment this Monday. When I finally decided to stop screaming at my family and come home, I had a breakthrough. I am so mad because I try my hardest as a mom and things don't work out. I'm physically aching all over by the end of a weekend. I can't relax at social events because the kids are running 18 different directions nearly falling off decks or scaling staircases. Church is better, but still stressful. I clean my kitchen twice a day and it still looks awful. There are cheerios and goldfish everywhere. Our laundry isn't done until someone runs out of underwear. I'm unwillingly being dragged along with the perception that I could be doing a much better job. Not a very healthy attitude or realistic expectation.
But it's ok. My kids are fed, loved, and happy. I have to fight to stay on course instead of drifting into the guilt and shame that the world feeds us. This philosophy of what "good" parents do. That is the luxury of an Westernized life I guess. To worry about which preschool will best equip our kids for life or feel like a lazy person for formula feeding our kids. I wasn't made to be an astronaut and I'm not able to fit into every single expectation that mom society expects of me.
Now if I could only believe it.
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