| Subject: Letters to Samson - 29 still more random bits |
Author:
Holly
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Date Posted: 08:38:28 06/10/07 Sun
In reply to:
Holly
's message, "Letters to Samson - 1" on 18:59:32 06/04/05 Sat
It's hard for me to watch my body crumble - slowly - around me. I want to be perfect. I want to be a perfect mother.
And nobody's perfect.
The secret part, the random bit at issue, is that we're not supposed to be perfect. It's the mistakes and the chaos that allow our flashes of brilliance. Really. People are seldom all good or all bad, all brilliant or all dull. Even the brightest among us make terrible, terrible mistakes. And the art in life is what we make of that.
My father was a hero. He was also an abused child with rage issues, who decided that the best way to impress his father was to join the field artillery. That's the part of the army on the front lines with the guns. And that's where he was in Korea and, then, Vietnam. He was one of the engineers who designed the rockets used to launch America's first manned spacecraft. And he was the systems analyst for the B1B, a nuclear weapons delivery plane. It took a long time for me to admit to myself that he wasn't perfect, but I had to do so in order to love him - my Dad, not some Dad idea in my head.
And that helped me to see people as more. Not better or worse than I thought they were or wanted them to be. More than just whatever was impressing or bugging me about them in a moment.
I think some people get this idea right from birth and can just accept people for who they are no problem. My friend Trishy is like that. In high school, I left her at a party to drive a drunk friend of ours home. Long story short is that things went very, very wrong, and I ended up staying for our drunk friend's family drama in which I was interrogated about the friend's drunken state by his mother - a Jesus-picture-painting apparent nutjob who kept batting out adorable little kids (who were up and giggling from around a corner) and his father - a United States Attorney. Not fun for me. Especially when drunk friend stripped down to his underwear.
Okay, so maybe that wasn't short. It certainly wasn't short for Trishy, who was back at the party with no ride home and a weekend job at a deli where she had to be at work by 6 a.m. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I had talked her into going out by promising I'd get her home early.
I went back and got her. She was mad. The next day, I called to apologize again, and she said, "That was yesterday. I was mad. This is today. I'm over it."
Trish was never going to go to college. It wasn't even an issue. She became an extremely successful hairdresser (worked at one of the top salons in the country until she decided the money was not worth the pain in the ass. By then, I had my law license and got her out of her noncompete agreement. Hah.) Her husband, another one of my best friends from high school, is a pipefitter. He's also a talented inventer. They're two of the smartest, wisest people I've ever met, and their daughter is beautiful and brilliant.
That was yesterday. I was mad. This is today. I'm over it. I've learned a lot more from Trish in the last 30 years than I've learned from people with much better test scores. As a teenager, she was able to hold in her head that I let her down, wasn't perfect, and she had feelings about that, and then it was over. Maybe if I hadn't apologized and done better after that, we would not still be friends, but I never forgot that she was able to see me as I was and be my friend anyway.
Even though I'd made her mad.
There's also my boss, John. I quit within two months of taking that job. Then, I went back as an independent contractor, so that we would have more of a peer relationship. That was in 2002, and, since then, I have seen 10 women come and go, 8 of them in tears. He's a terrible boss. Awful. Mean. Blame-shifting. He's also a big softie, a loyal friend, a madly loving husband and father, and a great litigator. He's helped me half a dozen times since I had to stop working. I stayed while I could, because I knew he was more than a bad boss. But, I think there was more to it than that.
There's more to me than that.
It's not natural for me to be okay with making a mistake. It's not natural for me to be okay with someone being mad at me. There have been times in my life when I have been paralyzed with fear that I might make a mistake or make someone mad at me. I think I have chosen difficult bosses and difficult professions throughout my life in order to stroke my perfectionism. The fact that they would go bananas over a tiny mistake and that sane people would not work for them was a plus in my mind.
I do not want this for you.
I want the mistake demystified for you. Mistakes, death, and anger - the big three. They happen to everyone. You will live through your own mistakes and the mistakes of others. Well, some mistakes one doesn't live through, but we'll talk about that another time. Most mistakes are trivial, and many can lead to something delightful. Or useful. if necessity is the mother of invention, mistake is the mother of necessity.
You will always have choices in the aftermath of a mistake. Maybe not as many as you want. You don't get to choose whether someone else is angry with you about it. But you always get to choose the following:
1. Are you going to acknowledge the mistake? If it's yours, I suggest that you own it. If it's someone else's mistake, well, I don't know. Give me a few years.
2. Are you going to allow yourself to have feelings about the mistake?
3. Are you going to allow the feelings to pass?
4. Are you going to accept the gift of the mistake? Sometime this means learning from it. Sometimes, there's more.
Other choices you may have: fix it? re-evaluate a friendship or other relationship? plead guilty to a misdemeanor? accept someone else's feelings about it?
This last one is something you seem to be learning to do all on your own. You don't like when someone is mad at you, but you don't seem to make more of it than it warrants. I worry that there may be more going on than you let on, that you're protecting me from your feelings or cutting your father and me more slack than we deserve.
Because, damn it, when it comes to you, we should be perfect.
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