"[It]'s a total Monet!"
Fair warning: this is a long one. Guess that's what happens when I don't write for nine months!
Years ago, when I first met my now-husband, I told my therapist that he'd called me “Type A.” I expected her to laugh, as I had, but instead she raised her eyebrows and said “do you not think you're Type A?”
Well, no. I explained that I thought of Type A people as successful, and I considered myself average at best. She countered that feeling like perfection was something other people achieved was, in fact, an extremely perfectionist trait. I shrugged and agreed to a compromise: maybe I'm Type A-minus.
In the years since, with more therapy and more time being seen by a very shrewd partner, I've been hard-pressed to ignore my perfectionist tendencies. As he likes to tell me, it's not that I never achieve anything, but that “you're always moving the goalpost.”
I'll tell you who's the best ally I've ever had in the fight against perfectionism: my infant son. When you literally only have an hour here or there to do anything, getting things done, at whatever level, is the priority. (Case in point: I drafted this entire post with my right thumb, tapping out words on my phone while my baby slept in my left arm. Now that he's more aware of screens and other off-limits things, naptime is the only chance I get to focus on communications, to say nothing of my own writing.)
But there's another, less expected teacher that's come to the fore recently: needlepoint. Specifically, the stocking I'm making for my husband, one of three kits that I bought last year, thinking I'd have them all done by this Christmas. If you've ever done needlepoint, especially a project as large as a stocking, you know how funny and sad that assumption was.
Anyway, this endless needlepoint project has taught me to be less of a perfectionist because not only is it so easy to miscount a teeny tiny square, even with my glasses on and the bright overhead lights that I hate turned on to their max, but then later when I come back with a different color to work in that section, everything is off by one square, and that assumes that I only miscounted one square when in reality I probably miscounted a bunch… it's crazy-making, until you learn to let go of the expectation of perfection. Which is easier to do when you realize that everything is only fine-point detail up close, and most of the counting is to blend different shades of the same color. When you pull back, it's a bit like a pointillist painting: everything blurs into a pretty good representation after all.
The truth is, it looks pretty good, even though all the features of Santa's face are off by two squares. And yeah, his face looks a little small, but if you didn't know what it was supposed to look like you would just think it looked like a face – and nobody else does know what it's supposed to look like, because nobody else has been obsessively staring at the pattern!
And now, to the relevance: all this work against my perfectionist nature has been helping me with thinking about coming back to writing, especially after so long away. Periodically, I panic about all the time I'm “losing” to parenting – even though there's nothing loss-like about all the time I spend with my son – and it helps to remember that nobody else is studying the pattern of my career. They see the results, the progress, without any sense of what it was *supposed* to look like (according to my Type A-minus brain).
Combine that with how parenting has more generally helped me learn to let go of things being picture-perfect – or even just tidy or even, to be perfectly frank, clean – and I've really been learning to just enjoy what I can, to wring every last drop of joy out of things. Because nothing will ever be good enough, and there's only so much focus that I have to give to things that are not my baby and his immediate needs or wants or, honestly, even just the cuddles. Life is short, but it’s also long, and there will be time for non-baby things when my baby needs me less.
Recently, after months of ignoring my needlepoint project in favor of more “necessary” tasks, I've finally started letting myself relax during the rare moments I have to myself, which means I needlepoint every chance I get. I get completely lost in it. After the baby has gone to bed, we have an hour to eat something and talk to each other without distraction or watch a show before we need to get to bed ourselves. And I cram needlepoint into that overcrowded hour too, because even though I screw it up all the time and the thread knots when I’m stitching and staring at it makes my eyes burn, it also feels satisfying to watch the picture come to life on the not-quite-page, and there's something about the repetitive motion that feels soothing. Plus, there's something about the challenge to my brain that helps me feel a little bit more alive, a bit more like the person I was before motherhood, and hopefully still am, deep underneath all the feeding and changing and cooing and playing.
If I hadn't been able to push past my perfectionism, I wouldn't have gotten beyond the first square inch of the piece. And now that it's finally coming together, I think about this stocking hanging on our family's mantel for years and years and years to come. And I don't care that Santa's face is off by a few squares or the sky is blended a bit more haphazardly than the pattern calls for. I care that I'm going to have made that and it's going to be a true labor of love. It's going to have taken me hundreds of hours. And it'll all be worth it to see it hanging on our mantel next to (hopefully, eventually) one for the baby and one for me as well.
And that, to me, is perfect.
Recent Writing
You know, I was prepared to come here and say that of course I haven’t published anything new, because I’ve been almost entirely focused on my son since his birth, with the odd bit of attention paid to capitalist notions of survival. But then I got this in the mail:
It’s the anthology into which one of my essays was accepted last year! I’d nearly forgotten, the publication process took so long. But that’s the best kind of reaping, the surprise kind resulting from seeds sown so long ago that you’d stopped waiting for them to sprout.
The essay is a strange, creepy, hybrid thing – part nonfiction and part extended metaphor. It’s on page 80 and you can get the anthology here. The other included writers are also super talented, including my fabulous friend Shelley Walden!
Also, this New Years marks the ten year anniversary of Navel Gazing's publication (let’s not talk about how old and/or unaccomplished this makes me feel), so if you haven’t read it yet and you’d like to, I’d love to share it with you! If you’re in the UK or a commonwealth country (not Canada though, because who knows why that’s a thing), you can get a print copy at your favorite bookstore or order it online. If you’re not in one of those countries, the audiobook is available worldwide.
Recent Reading
Because it’s been so long since I last wrote here and I’ve actually been able to do a shocking amount of reading, thanks to audiobooks and contact naps, I’m going to limit this to three of my favorite reads since my last installment, in no particular order:
The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah
People Person, by Candice Carty-Williams
Slippery Creatures, by KJ Charles
A Random Joy
It’s hardly random, because my whole life revolves around it right now, but I get an absurd amount of joy from this little face. I hope it brings you some joy today too.