The other day my four-year-old was playing on the floor with Bristle Blocks while I fiddled around nearby, picking up the house. She told me she was making a bunk bed, but I could see her struggling with its structural soundness, growing more and more frustrated each time the structure crashed.
It didn’t take long before she called for help. Without trying to solve the problem for her, I talked with her about the different ways she could keep the top bunk propped up, and then we tested each option together.
I left her to her bunk-building, but within seconds she was frustrated again, calling me back. Without giving it another try, she wanted me to build it for her.
“You can do it,” I urged, fighting my instinct to rescue her from distress.
“I can’t!” she shrieked.
“Aw, come on,” I said. “Just try.”
Through frustrated tears, she explained her goal of stacking the “bunk beds,” of which there were nine, that she and her magically-inclined mind hoped would hang in mid-air, three stories high.
But her vision was so grand it was stopping her efforts to even try.
Oh, how I could relate!
In addition to being a mom, I’m also a writer – and a perfectionist. I can’t count the number of scenes, stories, or novels I’ve been working on that have gotten gridlocked simply because it’s not coming out on paper as grand as it is in my mind. When the greatness between those two doesn’t synch up, it can be so immensely frustrating that I just want to give up.
And yet, once greatness has been envisioned, giving up is impossible. The vision is too much a part of me and becomes something absolutely necessary for me to see through … even if it’s not (gasp!) perfect.
But facing that something I’m creating isn’t perfect, and never will be, is deeply vulnerable and hugely unsettling. While you’d think it’d be comforting to know that perfection isn’t attainable, there’s a lot of sadness in actually feeling it, and letting all of the losses around that register.
This, I have come to see, is the heart of my own battle with becoming paralyzed by perfectionism – so easy to see objectively and with compassion while watching my daughter paralyzed by her grand plans for those neon-colored Bristle Blocks.
She was frustrated with me for not building the bunk beds for her. And sure, I could have fixed the structure for her, or helped her brainstorm other solutions with more engineering savvy. But I could sense how important it was, in that moment, to let her feel the disappointment and sadness. It’s what her brain needed to adapt.
“Oh, honey,” I said. “It’s so hard when something isn’t working the way you imagined it.”
Her first reaction was anger. But eventually, as I held her, both physically – and emotionally, holding her in the sadness of it all – came her tears.
Later, she quietly went back to building her bunk beds. The urgency and frustration had dissipated and in its place, peaceful acceptance and a new approach. She’d adapted her plan from an engineering perspective. But the real adapting was going deeper than any engineering lesson could afford. She was learning how to see those bunk beds through to completion, imperfectly perfect as they were.
© Sara Easterly. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published as an editorial by the Seattle Neufeld Community.
