Thursday, February 1, 2018

#realisthenewperfect

I guess I was born trying to be perfect.  It wasn't something my parents pushed on me.  They didn't have to.  I wanted to be the fastest, the smartest, the friendliest.  I'll admit when my A- in my high school calculus class bumped me from being my class's salutatorian, I might have cried a little.  They already made me write my speech. Or when I came up a few seconds short in the regional cross country meet from making all region, I might have been a little more than rationally bummed out. Coastal running is my thing though!  After they redrew the conferences and we ended up in the western region, I never came close.  At those moments, I learned that perfection isn't always obtainable.  I tore my ACL my senior year playing soccer on a team that had a losing record, but I still had a lot of things going for me.  I accepted a pretty prestigious teaching scholarship to attend my mom's Alma mater and I wasn’t scarred from graduating third in my class after a tragedy took the life of one of my closest friends just a week before graduation.

I joke with people that when I graduated college that I was convinced that I was going to change the world. It’s not that I don’t think teachers cannot change the world, but that picture that I had created in my mind was not what my classroom was like at all.  That first year, I might have danced the Soulja Boy but I also had a desk thrown at me.  I might have helped kiddos really learn to read and multiply, but they still didn’t reach proficiency. I did want to quit.  But I didn’t.  Not without a lot of encouragement from coworkers, family, and friends, I survived that first year and I had an amazing second year to follow.  All those real events were not perfection, but they are some of the building blocks that made me the person I am today.

Because of real life happenings, I realized that picture perfect flawlessness doesn’t really exist. People exist, love exists, but there’s a lot of things out there outside the realm of my control.  When I had these babies, I decided that I really was going to go more with the flow… especially when the second one arrived exactly thirteen and a half months after her older sister.  Real was the way to go.

Even so, there are days that I feel like I fail.  I fail my girls.  I fail my students.  Luckily, my husband has NEVER expected me to be perfect and reminds me constantly that I am the only person in the world holding me to these crazy standards.  That said, I want so badly to help everyone do well.  I want to be a valuable part of a team and on days where I’m my harshest critic, I just feel anything but.

I say all this to say, mommas, if you feel like your kids are getting less than your best, they aren’t.  My girls haven’t stopped crawling on me and kissing on since we got home.  One is literally laying across me right now. They do not care that I fed them fast food for dinner and they love telling me all about their days.  They aren’t keeping score with their friends’ moms that packed them bento box perfect lunches or made them the best 100th day of school project.  And teachers, you are changing the world.  One hug, fist bump, high five at a time.  I tell my students they ARE NOT numbers on papers, but you know what, teachers, YOU ARE NOT either.  While I hold myself to perhaps unreachable expectations, I have to realize how far we’ve come since day 1, and some of that distance cannot be measured by Lexile and percentages.

I’m giving myself this pep talk, but I bet I’m not the only person out there that needs the reminder that real is the new perfect.  You can photoshop every blemish and filter out all your imperfections, but at the end of the day they real, the actual, that’s what makes memories, that’s what makes the difference. Don't be too hard on yourself.