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Perfection Expectations
by
Danielle Conger
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Occasionally
I run across a misperception online about the perfection of some
unschooling families—as if folks create a conglomerate image
of all
the perfect moments about which people happily post. Reading the lists,
it’s easy to have thoughts like—“Wow!
They’ve got it all figured out. Their kids aren’t
crying, kicking and screaming, or arguing. They do everything
perfectly—negotiate and work things out all the
time!”
I want to disabuse folks of that notion both because I’ve yet
to meet a perfect unschooling family and because I can assure everyone
that my family and I are most certainly not perfect.
We’re
still dealing with many of the same things that others are: a wide
range of intense emotions, disruption, conflict and
sibling squabbles. These things don’t magically go away, and
there’s no such thing as perfection.
What does change, I think, is the frequency and intensity of such
difficulties. Conflict is bound to occur, but how people cope with
conflict can vary widely. Mindful parenting, respect and
trust—the foundations of unschooling—can make a
significant difference in the level of conflict within a family. This
process is what so many of us have come to embrace and celebrate on the
lists, perhaps making our own lives appear easy or perfect from the
outside.
What I’ve seen change, too, in my own life is how I cope
with challenges and which lenses I choose to look through when dealing
with them. Also, I have more tools in my toolbox and a foundation of
trust and partnership with my children that I’ve built over
time. These work well much of the time, but there are other times when
negotiations break down, times when I’ve tried all my tools,
but Sam’s still running to his room screaming.
These are the moments when coping strategies, validation and acceptance
are paramount—moments that leave little room for perfection
expectations if I am to move through them gracefully.
Frequently, the biggest sabotage I’ve found to living
joyfully arises from the very concept of perfection itself. Perfection
is a bugbear, a roadblock to joyful living, whether we’re
expecting perfection from ourselves or imagining it from others.
I remember when Em was born. I was going to be a perfect mother. In so
many ways, I needed to be a perfect mom. I didn’t like the
way I was mothered. Being a perfectionist myself, I wanted to give Em
the best of everything. And if I’m honest, I probably wanted
Em to be the perfect child I envisioned over the nine months she lived
in my womb. There were just so many levels and layers of wanting to be
perfect that, looking back, I’m surprised they
didn’t drown us both!
I sometimes joke that the best thing that ever happened to Em was Jules
coming along. Thankfully, the level of perfection I was trying to
attain by doing things like making all her food from scratch, mixing it
only with breastmilk—you know, freezing food in those perfect
little cubes of carrots and peas—rapidly became superfluous.
I gave birth to my second child and had two in diapers, then, sixteen
months later, three in diapers, and all pretense of perfection fell by
the wayside.
I went totally into survival mode, trying to make the best of every
moment
I had. Notions of perfection perhaps still niggled, but they were no
way within my grasp. I was treading water in the depths of motherhood,
gasping for air, paring life down to the barest essentials: love,
touch, nourishment, sleep.
Three children so close in age showed me how absolutely individual each
of them is. I released relatively quickly the idea of making them
anything, leaving behind the illusion that if I were the perfect mom, I
could produce the perfect child.
Children are who they are.
While I still have bad moments once in a while, my toolbox has grown. I
find, too, that I need it less often by replacing perfection
expectations with tools like meditation, deep breathing and
visualization.
For a long time, the knee-jerk reactions that I (and so many of us!)
grew up with were still there, but with each mindful resolution to
conflict, they became less and less a part of who I was. I found my
parenting narrative changing as I substituted old voices with new
peaceful, gentle and nurturing voices—nurturing of both my
own emotions and needs and those of my children.
Knee-jerk reaction isn’t so knee jerk any more. Some still
linger, subterranean, haunting me in particularly stressful moments
when my personal reserves are low, but the more I practice, the more I
think, talk and write about my parenting goals, the more I reinforce my
own beliefs.
We all have the power to change those ingrained patterns; of
course, the tools will be different for different people. Writing is my
own process and has helped me to rewrite those patterns of my own
reactions. Writing on the lists helps a lot, offering one more tool to
move away from reacting badly to bad moments, uncovering solutions
instead of reinforcing perfection expectations.
The perfection we expect from ourselves comes not only from our own
parenting models, but also from images of what that perfect parent
looks like from within our own core philosophies. La Leche-inspired,
Waldorf-inspired or Montessori-inspired ideals carry images of
perfection as much as commercial and institutional culture.
The problem with using these external images of perfection as models is
that we tend to fall short when our goals exist outside ourselves. How
can we ever get there? We need, instead, to locate our
goals within our own hearts, to look within ourselves when defining the
parents we hope to be.
To put it simply, I can’t be someone I’m not.
If I’m using external measures of perfection for myself or
for my home—whether cobbled together from my parenting
philosophies or email lists—then I’m never going to
measure up. I’m going to miss becoming my best self and the
best parent I can be. Little
glimpses of perfection dwell only in the
present moment where we're able to access our best selves and forge
connections with those we love.
Another huge stumbling block to joyful living appears when we expect
perfection from our children. This expectation, I’ve found,
is a multilayered thing. Too often as parents, we expect our children
to act appropriately all the time or to live up to our expectations of
their age level, regardless of their individual developmental level.
As I looked inside and tried to be honest with myself, I realized there
was a big part of me that wanted my children to be happy all the time.
This desire wasn’t just because I wanted people to see my
happy children, though of course I did. More than that, I felt badly if
they weren’t happy all the time because, my reasoning went,
perfect mothers have happy children.
But who can live up to that? That kind of insidious reasoning was more
about me than my kids. I was denying them their own humanity in favor
of my own misplaced self-worth.
Children inevitably face disappointment, sadness, anger—the
same complex range of emotions that adults experience. I realized that
if my kids were unhappy about a disappointment genuinely beyond my
control—not a “life’s tough”
kind of thing, but an experience beyond parental anticipation, like Sam
getting upset because a beautiful spell of warm weather in February
goes away and he’s madder than hell, or a new game
doesn’t go his way—then that emotional engagement
is a pure and important part of life learning.
I found that if I expended my energy running around trying to fix
everything or to stifle emotions, then not only was I denying my
children their own process, but, worse, I found that my kids would
quickly pick up on that energy and spiral even more out of control
because I wasn’t honoring their feelings in the moment.
When I traced this energy back to its root, I realized I was creating
perfection expectations for my children—an expectation that
my children were going to accept disappointments, hurts and frustrations
gracefully. I was creating perfection myths out of my own philosophies:
like if I only filled their cups enough, or co-slept and carried them,
or eliminated all violent toys and games that would mean that my kids
would never be
unhappy or upset or lash out. Sure, there are lots of tools I can use
to reduce adversity, but I can’t erase it completely, and I
shouldn’t want to.
Now, I advocate meeting our children where they’re at, loving
them for who they are—for all that they are, the full
emotional package. Now, I advocate validating and honoring our
children’s emotions, saying, “yeah, life is tough,
sometimes, it’s sad, it’s hard, it’s
frustrating—let me share in that with you and support you
instead of trying to erase your feelings.” People want to be
validated and honored and understood—“Wow, she
really knows me!”—that’s the kind of
connection people need; that’s the kind of connection I want
with those I love.
When I move toward that authentic way of relating and say,
“‘Rage, rage against the dying of the
light,’ do it, feel, be emotional, live life fully,
don’t shut those emotions down, embrace everything life has
to offer, live it, live it all!” then I move toward
authentic connection. Life is not going to be perfect, and perfection
expectation shuts down those connections I truly seek.
When we can move away from perfection expectations of ourselves and our
children, we reveal that perfection itself is rooted in conditional
love. It sends messages that say, “I love you, but only some
of the time.” If we do that to ourselves, then
we’re loving ourselves conditionally. If we do that to our
children, then we’re loving them conditionally.
The problem is that knowing and honoring full emotional expression gets
really difficult
when we're caught up in perfection expectations because concepts of
perfection
don’t include lots of different possibilities. They
don’t allow people to be different in different spaces. They
don’t allow the space for conflicting modes of being.
You know what? I’m a conflicted person!
I contain joy and despair and happiness and disappointment, sometimes
all in the same moment. Walt Whitman once said, “Do I
contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself; I am
large—I contain multitudes!”
Embrace that sense of multitude! Be large, not narrowed down into a
narrow concept of perfection contained within straight, narrow lines.
Leave those perfection expectations behind, and choose, instead, to
live fully, embracing all of life’s possibilities!
This article was adapted from a Live and Learn Conference presentation
titled, "Perfection, Timeless Truths and Things I'd Never Do,"
available on MP3 at the Live
and Learn Shop.
Danielle
Conger lives and learns
with her three children, Emily, Julia and Sam, and her husband, Jim, in
Northwestern Maryland. There they enjoy homesteading
adventures
together with their many animals. She stays busy playing, gardening,
laughing, loving and
writing and can be found online at the AlwaysUnschooled e-list or here, editing Connections.
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