Perfection

I've been a perfectionist as long as I can remember.  To be honest with you, I never stopped to think about why I feel like I have to do everything perfectly, I've just always acknowledged that it's a part of who I am, and I have to work with it.  Recently though I realized that it might help me to loosen up on the perfection front, if I actually had an understanding of why I am the way I am.  So I thought about it for awhile and it didn't take me long to figure it all out.

When I was a kid I was overweight.  I'm not quite sure how it happened, because at that point in time, neither of my parents were overweight and my mom was actually a new diabetic, so our meals were pretty carefully made.  Yet my brother and I both ended up weighing too much.  It wasn't until I was half way through high school that I realized I had some control over all of it and lost the weight.  It's been a daily struggle for the rest of my life, but I'm really proud of the fact that I've never gained more then 10 to 15 pounds back (unless you count when I was pregnant, which trust me, was pretty scary for me).  That experience changed me even more then infertility I would say, and there's nothing else in my life that even comes close to that.

It's really hard being a kid whose overweight.  Kids are cruel.  Even though the fact that I was overweight was no fault of my own (I mean I was a kid, I ate what I was given to eat), that didn't matter to other kids.  I was teased a lot and I realize now that's why I am such a perfectionist.  The best way to avoid getting teased, is to not give anyone ammunition.  I couldn't change my weight (at that point, or not that I realized anyway), but I could make sure that nothing else about me was a target.  And I've been doing that ever since.  I don't like to do anything in public until I've perfected it in private.  I don't want to be bad at anything.  Well, that's not totally true, I don't mind being bad, I just don't want other people to know that I'm bad at anything.  I don't want people to think badly of me or dislike me.  And I'm still that way.

I've started to realize though that this is something I really need to get over, or at least minimize.  Now I have a little girl who watches everything that I do, and if I don't want to make any mistakes, how can I tell her that it's okay for her to try something and not be perfect at it?  I can't.  So I'm going to work on it. I'm not that chubby little girl anymore and I, hopefully, don't have a whole bunch of people just waiting for me to mess up.  I'm not quite sure how to fix it all, but my plan is to just jump into things more and see what happens.  I'm going to start with a gift for hubby's birthday I think.

One thing I've never been good at is riding a bike.  I know how, but I stopped when I was a kid.  The whole chubby kid thing didn't work out too well with bike riding.  It's something that hubby really likes though and has wanted to do together ever since we got together, and it's something that we can do with Bean someday.  I've avoided it because I'm so out of practice that I feel like I'm not going to be very good at it, and you can't exactly practice riding a bike in your house.  You have to do it out in the world.  So I feel like it's the perfect thing to thrust my perfectionist self out into broad daylight.  Beyond that, I'm not sure where to go from here.  But I'm willing to try for Bean.