Learning About Good Enough

I have a half day today. I am off tomorrow. I want to get things done so I feel good going into the new year.

This concept of setting goals and making resolutions for the new year is amazing to me. We, as a human race, love to start over. We look for that next line of demarcation so that we can say “From this point on, I will be this way. I want these new things and this point in time is when I choose to start pursuing them.” Perfectionists are especially guilty of this. We wait to start new things (a diet, an exercise plan, a special project) until the “right time.”

For me, this is normally Sunday. If Sunday happens to fall on the first of the month, I am the happiest person on Earth. If January 1st were on a Sunday, I might weep with joy. I love that sort of perfection. It feels like the stars are aligning for goal-setting.

But that’s not happening this year. January 1, 2014 is a Wednesday. Oy. Starting something in the middle of the week is just about the best way to guarantee that I will put it off until Sunday. Wednesday is not a perfect day.

I can't let that matter this year. This year, I have Ladybug, my daughter. She is almost three months old now and she doesn't care about perfect. She is teaching me about good enough.

You see, perfect takes too long for Ladybug. For example, she doesn't care about getting just the right shot for her monthly "progress" picture, she just wants us to take off the itchy headband. If we take too long to snap the picture, she is going to crank up and wail. Her 1 month photo was a disaster for me as a perfectionist.

My sister-in-law, an amateur photographer (a good one), had taken monthly pictures of my niece, C, and they were my idea of perfect. Every month had the same black background, the same stuffed animal, and C in relatively the same spot. At her first birthday, all twelve of the images were lined up so everyone could see how C had grown that year. I wanted to do something like that for Ladybug. 

We searched for months for the right sized stuffed critter, ending up with a $10 bear from Walmart because it was big enough to be a good comparison and cute enough to see every month for a year (and because we were tired of looking, a good stuffed animal is hard to find these days). We bought some pink polka dot ribbon to give him a bowtie and set him in the crib to wait for his moment to shine. We decided to use the baby blanket my grandmother, BomBom, had crocheted for Ladybug as the backdrop and the big chair in the living room for the setting. 

When November 7 rolled around, we set everything up, dressed Ladybug in our favorite outfit (a gray footed sleeper with purple and blue owls) and put a flowered headband on her. We got out the "big camera": a DSLR type that we had bought specifically to take "good" pictures of our daughter. We propped our one month old up next to the teddy bear, both of them sitting on her white afghan, and expected magic. We didn't get it.

We couldn't get the right angle. The lighting was bad. Ladybug was crying in this one.  The headband slipped over her eye. The bear fell over in that one. My husband, Handsome, tried so hard to get the right shot, but we were in over our head. She melted down and so did we.

We got some decent shots, but they weren't perfect. They didn't match up to the ideal I had decided was the benchmark. I was frustrated and depressed and gave the project up as a failure. On December 7, I made sure to take pictures of Ladybug with my iPhone, but the bear stayed in the crib (SIDS risk, I know, she doesn't sleep in it yet, calm down), the blanket stayed on the shelf, and the big camera stayed in its bag. I regret that now, so much. Because I couldn't have perfection, I didn't even try.

As the new year approaches, I am forcing myself to reform my idea of perfect. In some places, I want to refine it; in some, I want to abandon it altogether. Every day my baby girl gets older and does new things; time is flying by me. If I wait for perfection and consider anything less failure, I am going to miss too much and spend too much precious time feeling frustrated and depressed. This year, I want to learn that good enough is not less or bad, it is enough.

P.S. - Monthly pictures have turned into quarterly pictures. We are going to try again on January 7, her three month birthday. Stay tuned for the results.