tiggerprr’s scratching post

I was chatting with a friend about some deep life things, and had to scoot off to an appointment. While on the drive, I was thinking about what we’d talked about and this blog post began to write itself in my head. I hear that’s a sign of a true writer. Who knows, but it sure made the drive short.

Too often, people try so hard to be the perfect parent, the perfect spouse, the perfect kid, the perfect friend, the perfect student, the perfect employee, the perfect boss, the perfect weight, and so on. Our drive for perfection is futile though, yet we still do it and some of us are disappointed when we fail. Women, in particular, fall prey to these feelings of imperfection and the need to be better. Men do as well, it’s not a gender thing, but I think that women have a tendency to be more outward about the self-loathing they can bring on themselves. This is why you see more women starving themselves to death and outside of Hollywood, more women altering their bodies in the quest for perfection. I’m no different from everyone else in that I try very hard to do everything I set out to do as perfectly as possible and have been disappointed to find that it’s not always going to work out that way.

I really wanted to be the perfect parent, because I didn’t have perfect parents. Then I realized along the way, there isn’t any such thing. We’re all going to make mistakes, even ones we swore to ourselves we’d never do or subject our child to. We’re only human after all, and sometimes you just have to let go and just let things be. Then just hope upon hope that the mistakes you’ve made do more good than harm later. Maybe one of the greatest gifts we can give our kids is sharing with them that we’re not perfect, and letting them see us rise above it anyway.

I’m definitely not the perfect spouse. Who is though, a relationship without any conflict is really not healthy when you’re dealing with two people. I do and say things that I regret, and I need to become better at admitting I’m not perfect in that regard. Boy, that’s a toughie, I’m used to being right all the time. It was supposed to be part of the marriage contract, right?

I may be the perfect catmommy, as evidenced by the cute picture I posted for my Wordless Wednesday. He loves me, he loves to sleep on me. But, alas, I forgot to buy a new bag of cat litter when we changed it last week, so this week, the cats had to deal with a half full box for a night. So, I’m not the perfect catmommy either.

I guess, I will have to accept perfection in the only realm that success is guaranteed, imperfection.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 11:22 am and is filed under Life, Me, Parenting, People In General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.