Parenting and perfectionism; mutually exclusive?

I remember the moment I first became a perfectionist. It was a cold winter evening around 6 p.m. My father had just returned from work and was taking his first real breath of the day behind his faux granite bar with the padded tangerine vinyl facade. I sat across from him on one of the matching vinyl bar stools in my Lanz of Salzburg nightgown, my long locks pulled tightly into a neat ponytail. I am 9 or 10 and have just received my mid term grades. I can’t wait to show them to my father. We had a rule that we had to wait at least 10 minutes from the moment he walked into the house before we bombarded him with all of the critically important information we had gleaned throughout the day. My 10 minutes were finally up.

“Dad,” I eagerly started, “Wanna see my report card?”

“Of course,” he smiled with the warmth that assured me of his sincerity.

I showed him my prized tally of grades that reflected how hard I had worked all semester. “Almost all ‘As’,” I boasted. “Just two ‘Bs’ in social studies and shop. And that’s just because I was scared to use that circular saw.”

My father perused the report card closely, his expression as neutral as a high stakes poker player. “Well,” he said gently, “If that’s the best you can do…”

I remember the sinking feeling in my chest. I felt unsteady, as if someone had pulled the carpet out from beneath me. I nearly toppled off the barstool. My best? Well, of course that’s not my best. I can do better! I can! I am smart and worthy of your love. I will never disappoint you again! Never!

I actually said nothing out loud. But the horror of all my self doubts screamed so loud inside my head that I couldn’t hear anything my father might have said to lessen the sting of his comment. “If that’s the best you an do…”

I never got another B in school. I drove myself like an animal. I could not accept anything lower than an A from that moment forward. Throughout middle school, high school, even college, I never forgot the stabbing pain of my father’s disappointment at my better than average academic performance. I had let him down and it would never happen again.

Clearly this sits at the core of many of my “issues” to this day. I cannot tolerate letting people down. I will go to ridiculous lengths to finish projects, follow through on obligations, and complete even the most insignificant tasks with the fierce dedication and commitment of a soldier whose mission it is to save the world from the forces of evil. It’s really a sickness.

I have also achieved many amazing things in my life and past careers. I cannot blame my father without also acknowledging that he lit a fire inside me that enabled me to fight relentlessly and never accept mediocrity. A gift? A curse? I’m really not sure. Perhaps a little of both.

Which brings me to today. My kind, smart, funny, creative 12 year old son, Levi, got his 6th grade final report card. “Mom,” he asked the moment he entered the car, “Do you think that 2 “Bs” are bad? I mean, if everything else is an “A”?” I struggled to answer. Clearly there is a right and a wrong response to this question that will set my son up for either a lifetime of failure and disappointment or years of stellar achievement and accomplishment. I am dumbstruck. What to say?

“What were the “Bs” in?” I ask non-judgmentally.
“Hebrew and Social Studies,” he answers. “And my social studies teacher was the hardest teacher at the school.”

“I certainly don’t think that’s bad,” I stammer, “I would have liked to have seen all “As” of course. But it could have been worse. Are you happy with these grades?”

“Well, I really wanted to get all “As”,” he shared, “But I think I’m pretty okay with how I did.”

“Great,” I tried to smile genuinely, “As long as you’re satisfied with yourself. That’s all anyone can ever ask of you.”

But this particular issue about grades seems even more potent for me. What is a parent supposed to say? Truthfully, I was disappointed that he didn’t get all “As”. But I’m pretty sure that’s because I have a skewed view of reality that doesn’t allow for me to make mistakes. So how can I overcome my own issues in order to accept my son for who he is, even if sometimes who he is isn’t perfect.

I have to tell you, I spend an inordinate amount of time wondering which of my many maternal missteps will poison my children’s developing psyches. I have truly developed this type of worrisome brooding into an art form. Whether its a careless public comment about an unzipped zipper or an insensitive wrist slap as one of my boys reaches for their fifth brownie at Thanksgiving dinner, I am certain that I am, or will be, the reason my children end up deeply disturbed, depressed, or at least depicted in numerous chapters of the DSM-VII (or whatever number it is by the time they’re in therapy.)

By accepting our kids as they are, are we encouraging them somehow to be less than they are capable of becoming? Does that even make sense? I want my son to be happy and well adjusted. I also want him to work hard and achieve because he has the capacity to accomplish great things in his life. How do you instill work ethic, determination, and tenacity while also allowing for imperfection, error and the occasional foul-up?

This is hard, parenting. I want to do it right so badly. But I don’t even know what right looks like most of the time. Anybody have the answer to this one?

Just desserts

I am crushed. I just discovered a betrayal of monumental proportion. My favorite restaurant is deliberately utilizing sophisticated, pre-meditated, cognitive techniques in order to manipulate my behavior and psychologically pressure me into doing what they want me to do. This is one of those horrifying realities you try hard not to believe. But at a certain point, you can no longer deny the subversive tactics being employed against you.

I have a favorite eatery. It is one of those restaurants I never tire of frequenting. Their food is delicious, relatively low cal, fresh, filling and nutritious. And they have fabulous desserts. The greatest thing about their desserts is that nothing is ever over 475 calories. Plus the desserts are incredibly eye-pleasing, decadent and small enough to avoid any kind of post-repast guilt or remorse. I always order dessert at this restaurant. Until yesterday.

Yesterday I met my mom and sister-in-law at my fave spot late in the afternoon. I just wanted coffee since I’d eaten several hours earlier. But both of them were hungry and ordered lunch. After they’d finished eating and our table had been cleared, our server came by, dessert tray in hand, and began laying out clean napkins and silverware for dessert. “I don’t think anyone is going to indulge,” I kindly remarked to save him the trouble of replacing all of the utensils and painstakingly describing each of the 10 stunning desserts before us.

He continued placing the silverware, though, as if he hadn’t heard me. My sister-in-law chimed in, “I don’t think we’re going to order dessert.” Again he ignored us and started to describe the first item on the tray, a healthy peach melba housed in a miniature shot glass.

It was then that I realized something astounding. I felt guilty. I felt guilty that he’d gone to all that trouble to lay out the table for dessert and I suddenly felt compelled, out of some kind of misguided sense of duty, to indulge in one of the tiny, tasty treats. I didn’t actually want to eat dessert. I’ve been very disciplined the last few days, adhering to my daily weight watcher point limit. Dessert was the farthest thing from my mind. But I was going to order one simply because I suddenly felt compelled to not hurt his feelings. Rationally, I realized the absurdity of this. But emotionally I’d been hooked. This realization, however, ignited my inner will. “We don’t want dessert!” I announced emphatically.

The server was taken aback by my assertive stance. He looked stunned, and hurt, like I’d shocked him, wounded him, rudely interrupted him. “But I have to finish,” he stammered. “It’s restaurant policy.” And at that moment, everything became clear. “You mean, that’s why you kept placing the dessert spoons and napkins on the table even though we said we didn’t want anything?” I inquired. Then he confessed, “Oh yeah. There’s a whole psychology to getting people to order dessert.”

Feeling guilty? Try not ordering one.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” he fearfully implored, “And if anyone asks, I did describe every dessert. OK?” We assured him of our loyalty and he defeatedly collected the spoons, napkins, and dessert tray and slunk away. His disappointment was palpable.

My sister-in-law picked up the tab. I bet she left him a hefty tip in response to his despondent demeanor. But wait a minute, maybe that was simply another form of emotional manipulation. Maybe he was merely feigning dismay in order to secure a few more gratuity percentage points. I wouldn’t put it past him.

It really is true. Once trust is destroyed in a relationship you can never go back.

Addicted to…what?

Sidore and Dave, what a beautiful couple.

Do you need to feel better about yourself? Seriously, I watched a tv show the other night and I realized that whatever problems I have, they are MINUSCULE compared to problems out there in the world.

I hate to sound like an old fart, but tv has really sunken to a new low. I watched this show called “Strange Addictions” on TLC because my only other viable options were the Kardashians and Bill O’Reily. I couldn’t stomach either of those. Not surprisingly, this show deals with people who have strange addictions. They basically define an addiction as something that distracts a person from the real pain in his/her life. Last night they profiled 4 addicts.

The first was a man addicted to his “synthetic partner.” Basically, this odd little guy was living with a human size (quite beautiful) doll with whom he was deeply in love. He spent all of his time with her. He loved conversing with her and described her as open, loquacious and clever. He was rather shocked though, by her surprising bashfulness during the television interview. He ate every meal with her. Fortunately her dietary needs were negligible. He even slept with her, and yes, I mean that in every sense of the word.

I felt badly for this man. But he kept insisting that he was perfectly happy this way, that his “girlfriend” kept his loneliness at bay, and that there are hordes of other people out there enjoying the benefits of “synthetic relationships.” Really? That’s kind of alarming.

Next up was a woman addicted to her blow dryer. (I’m not making this up.) She needed to have it with her as some type of security blanket. But the key component to this addiction was her inability to fall asleep and stay asleep without having the dryer turned on and lying next to her in her bed. I’ve done a bit of research and there are actually a lot of people who suffer from this addiction. There have even been documented tragedies of fatal house fires that began due to blow dryers catching fire in beds or on carpets. But even this dangerous reality could not sway this woman from sleeping with her nighttime hot air machine.

There was a young woman addicted to tanning. It was scary and sad, but not all that uncommon. But the final segment featured a woman who was addicted to eating coach foam. This was truly tragic because the synthetic fibers were poisoning her insides. But all I kept wondering was, “How does an addiction like this start?” I mean, what prompts someone to begin chowing down on her sofa? I’ll admit I often find myself too tired to meander over to the fridge during Jimmy Kimmel Live. But I’ve never even contemplated digging into the couch for sustenance. Frankly it sounds kind of primitive and cannibalistic to me. I mean, my couch is like part of my family.

Anyway, the point here is that you may be suffering. You may battle depression, feel enraged by society, yearn at times to strangle your two small children, but in reality, there are people out there eating couch foam, sleeping with their hair dryers and having sex with mannequins. Come on, how bad is your life really?

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Shhh! I’m trying to listen to myself!

Paper tigers can scare you as much as real ones!

Why is it we think our kids can escape the struggles we’ve spent our entire lives battling against? That’s what I kept thinking as my 10 year old son’s “talking doctor” explained to him that some kids have “worry brains” that always imagine the worst case scenario in every situation. So when I called my husband last night and asked him to meet me down the block so that our puppies didn’t become dinner to a wandering pack of coyotes I’d encountered, my son was certain that the phone call that led my husband out the front door was a tragic announcement of the demise of both myself and our beloved canines. It took several hours and a great deal of cognitive determination on all our parts to calm my son and finally coax him into bed.

But as I listened to him retelling the story today, there was something unnervingly familiar about his process; almost an eerie sense of deja vu engulfed me. Why? Because he is me! The anxiety. The worry. The incessant voices predicting doom and gloom. My first “talking doctor” called it “catastrophizing.” My son’s dramatic reactions are no different from the way I respond when instead of returning home at 6:30, my husband doesn’t arrive until 7:30 and I take myself step by step through the difficulties I will have to face as a newly widowed mother of two young boys.

I can’t help it. I tell myself irrational stories that scare the bejesus out of me. I’ve done this for as long as I can remember. Frankly, it amazes me when I meet people who don’t live in this type of constant agony. I try hard to contradict the voices that drone on in my head. Sometimes I’m even able to convince myself that whatever impending tragedy awaits me is merely a “paper tiger” as my dad used to say when I was a little girl and my anxiety first surfaced.

But somehow I conveniently forgot about brain genetics when I decided to have children. I guess if I’d realized that my sweet young babies would one day grow up to battle the same mental demons that have pursued me with such unwavering commitment all these years, I might have thought twice about having them. But then where would I be?

Maybe there’s a cosmic challenge here, a symbolic gauntlet that’s been laid at my feet. I need to stop the worry voices in my own head so that I can guide my son to a place of peace and ease within himself so that he doesn’t spend the rest of his life held hostage by a bunch of menacing voices whose only purpose is to keep him from becoming the amazing person he’s meant to become.

Hmmm…easier said than done.

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Therapy queues

The doctor is in...if you're willing to wait a few hours.

In a million years, you will never guess where I stood in line this morning at 6:30a.m.

Go ahead. Try.

Ticketmaster for tix to see the next popular, but sold out Garth Brook’s concert?
No.
Top-rated, coveted charter school to secure a spot for my boys for fall 2011?
No.
Hip new yoga studio for Swami Krishna’s hot yoga flow class?

No.

I stood in line at 6:30a.m. to reserve an after-school therapy appointment for spring and summer for my eldest son. I’m not joking. In order to snag a 4:00p.m., every-other-week appointment, we had to line up, with a host of other patients, outside the doctor’s office for more than an hour prior to the office’s opening.

Has the world gone mad? Queuing up at a psychologist’s office, (who not surprisingly does not take insurance), as if we were trying to get a table at Pizzeria Bianco? I felt like a complete moron.

But what choice did I have? I’ve tried taking my son out of school during the day for what we like to call “talking doctor” appointments. It’s an utter disaster. The conspicuous nature of an early school departure creates so much anxiety in my son that it renders the therapy session completely moot. They need to spend the whole 50 minutes talking him down over his missed class assignments and never get an opportunity to address the deeper, more pressing psychological issues that are causing him distress.

So instead, I opted to wake up at 5a.m. in order to be on the road by 6 and in line by 6:30. We ended up being 2nd in line behind a woman in a folding chair with a thermos of hot coffee who looked as if she’d possibly slept there the night before.

Her son had some serious psychological challenges and she confided that she’d been queuing up like this for 12 years! She confessed to hating the almost humiliating “groupie-esque” process the office insisted on using in the name of fairness. But this doctor had saved her son and helped them to restore some semblance of peace in her family. At the end of the day, it was worth the quarterly degradation of standing on line to secure a post 3p.m. appointment.

We did manage to procure a coveted 4pm spot. And I suppose, if all goes well, I’ll be back mid July with all of the other patients, vying for a 4p.m. fall/winter spot. Those are even harder to get I was told by one of the other veteran moms in line.

Not sure why this irks me quite as much as it does. I guess it sort of takes the personal relationship feeling out of the therapy equation for me. But I’m not the one who needs to feel connected to this doctor. My son really liked him and felt he was someone he could talk to.

So I guess I’ll just accept the fact that being a parent is a lot like being a place-holder in the long line of life. You stand around a lot, wait for something allegedly great to happen, and then, you pay through the nose for whatever it is you thought would solve the problems that ultimately end up working themselves out in spite of your consistent interference.

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Perception vs. reality

Is it me...or is it...memorex?

I have what’s commonly known as “body dysmorphia.” Well, I don’t know how commonly known it actually is. It’s really called “Body Dysmorphic Disorder.” I looked it up. Here’s what it said, “Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is sometimes referred to as dysmorphic syndrome. It is a psychological disorder in which the affected person is excessively concerned about and preoccupied by a perceived defect in his or her body image.” Does this not apply to everyone?

But wait, there’s more:
“It is estimated that 1–2% of the world’s population meet all the diagnostic criteria for BDD” Is that all? I find that hard to believe!!! Every woman I know over 40 has this. Seriously, I’m not making light of this because I really do have it.

I am and always have been convinced that I am HUGE. I’m not joking. When I look in the mirror, I see a fat woman looking back at me. Now over the years, with a tremendous amount of drugs and counseling, I have come to understand that my perception of myself is not the same as reality. I also understand (although this part is harder for me to believe) that if I surveyed 100 people who knew me, few if any would describe me as portly.

This is a challenging disorder to cope with. Shopping, for instance, is impossible. I spend all this time picking out size 16 capris and extra large tank tops, and then I put them on and think “Wow, I look pretty hot.” Then I get home and my husband is like, “What were you thinking? You look like a small child who just raided her mommy’s closet.”

I know what you’re thinking; Freud could definitely interpret that into some kind of wistful maternal longing based on a lack of nurturing from my childhood. But I’m not gonna go there. Anyway, I usually try to take someone with me when I shop these days. It’s kind of like that great moment in “A Beautiful Mind” when Russel Crowe (who has these visual halucinations) asks one of his students if the man who just approached him to offer him a Nobel prize actually exists.
I’ve tried asking salespeople if the billowy blouse I’m unsure of is actually my size. But they’re so eager to sell anything that I’ve yet to meet someone who answers me honestly.

Over the years my husband has gently nudged me towards developing a more fitted wardrobe. I’ve been afflicted with BDD as long as I can remember. In fact, I recall wearing most of my 6’3” father’s clothing throughout much of high school years. I told everyone it was my ode to Annie Hall. But retrospectively I think I honestly believed those clothes were the only ones that I could squeeze my 5’8” scrawny frame into. It’s actually kind of sad when I think about it.

The other day I was talking to this friend of mine who has personality dysmorphia. She honestly sees herself as reliable, reflective, altruistic and uniquely sensitive. She is, in fact, a thoughtless, self-obsessed flake who spends her life ruminating over inane dramas that truly don’t even exist. I realized that body dysmorphia maybe isn’t all that bad. It’s kind of like that famous saying; “I cried because I had no shoes. Until I met a man who had no feet.” Wow, do you think he really had no feet? Or could he possibly have been suffering from BDD?

In any event, I should probably get a new friend.

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Pull yourself together…or apart rather!

I am lying in traction at the physical therapist’s office, my lower lumbar spine being gently pulled apart vertebra by vertebra. It’s an incredibly freeing feeling. Elongation, extension, expansion. I feel like we all spend our lives in compression; tightened, condensed, making ourselves smaller. Trying to disappear.

I’ve had issues with my back for years, (ever since I had children, ironically). Sometimes I give up trying to feel better and just attempt to accept a life of constant (yet bearable) discomfort. But then I hear of a new treatment or meet someone who knows someone who went to someone…and I’m back on the case; pursuing a cure like a committed archeologist, unwilling to leave even a single stone unturned. Hence, I am back on the rack in a swanky Scottsdale office, hoping my insurance will pay for this primitive form of torture that may ultimately bring relief.

They say that back problems have to do with support. I believe in that whole “new agey” thing that all physical ailments are related to psycho-spiritual issues we’re facing. The whole support thing makes sense to me. It’s hard to get enough support as a mom. Even with partners who pitch in, relatively well behaved children, and family nearby, life for a mom can feel unsupported when it’s mainly up to us to support anyone and everyone around us.

So the theory says that we manifest a physical ailment in lieu of expressing a tortured emotional state or facing what we deem to be an unacceptable psychological position. I buy that. In our society, it’s a hell of a lot more acceptable to be out of commission for a herniated disc than to have to lie down in a dark room because you’re kids have pushed you to the brink of insanity.

Somewhere along the line we learned that taking care of ourselves emotionally didn’t count nearly as much as our efforts to mend our physical selves and acknowledge our bodily problems. Feelings of helplessness, of being overwhelmed, unsupported, all the things that moms feel, we deemed were weak, needy, unacceptable. So we pushed them aside and donned our supermom capes and set out to show the world how strong, capable and competent we were. But without acknowledging the pain, the fear, the weakness, we become less of who we are . We compress our soles. We make ourselves fit into a role that doesn’t always allow our spirits to soar. And then we feel alone, small, unsupported.

Hmmm…maybe that’s why it feels so good to be in traction, to grow longer, to extend ourselves, to take up more space.

I think I may be on to something.