Hello. My
name is Elizabeth, and I am a recovering perfectionist.
(Hello,
Elizabeth.)
The funny thing is I didn’t even know that about
myself until someone pointed it out to me about 10 years ago, during a time when
my world failed to make sense. All I
knew was that I was the kind of girl who could get things done and do them
well. Tough class? Study harder.
Complicated piano piece? Practice
longer. Nursing degree to earn/night
shift job to work/wedding to plan? Kiss
sleep goodbye and spin that hamster wheel, baby! Spiritual life? All boxes checked and organized
alphabetically, thank you.
I had never encountered an obstacle that I couldn’t
overcome simply by working harder. And
not only did I get the job done, I did it with flair. So help me, my performance was going to be as
good as (and hopefully a far sight better) than the people around me! You see, there was a twisted pay-off for all
that hard work: approval. The better I was, the more people thought
well of me, and I soaked up that approval like a thirsty camel in the
desert. This system worked well for me
for many years. And then I had a baby.
Have you ever noticed that God custom designs a
personal boot camp for all of us?
Whatever your particular weakness may be, you can bet that God will
design a set of circumstances meant to chip away at it. So, if you were God, and you had to deal with
shaping the character of a perfectionist, into what circumstances would you
plunge her? Hmm…something that’s the very opposite of clean, neat and
tidy…something that’s messy, nebulous and difficult for her to get her arms
around...the situation should last for a number of years so she can’t just grit
her teeth and wait it out…something that’s absolutely impossible to get perfect
no matter how hard she tries, but important enough that she feels deeply
compelled to try…I’ve got it! Parenting!
When I was pregnant with our oldest daughter, I had
a recurring daydream in which I liked to indulge: I pictured myself sitting in a comfy rocking
chair, positioned just perfectly in front of a south-facing window so as to
allow a beam of smooth, buttery sunlight to fall gently on my shoulder. My beautiful infant is at my breast, snuggled
up in a soft, fuzzy blanket, tiny fingers curled around a single finger of my
own, gazing into my eyes with utter contentment as she fills her little tummy
with milk.
(Cue
record needle scratch…)
My little 6 pound 12 ounce baby was absolutely
beautiful, and we did own more than one soft, fuzzy blanket, but that’s precisely
where the daydream ended. For the
record, there is no beam of smooth, buttery sunlight coming through the window
at 2:00 in the morning. Duh.
And my child did not serenely dine at the breast. She guzzled like a sailor in a bar for about
three minutes flat, refused to drink one drop more, and then spewed that
precious milk at high velocity toward the carpet. Bless her heart.
A lactation consultant at the hospital (Lord, forgive her, for she kneweth not what
she was doing) determined that my baby was not eating for a long enough
duration of time. I was too naïve to know
that I could have, and should have, pushed back. She put us on a handy-dandy feeding schedule
that looked like this: wake the baby up
every three hours to breastfeed for as long as we could manage (this involved
at least 45 minutes of hopelessly prodding our infant to eat when she had
fallen deeply and utterly asleep after the first 3 minutes of drunken guzzling); then, use a breast pump to extract the remaining milk; finally, attempt
once again to interrupt the unconscious slumber of the infant and finger feed her (with a syringe and tiny tube) the remaining milk. The lactation consultant forgot to mention
the step where the baby throws up all the milk you just spent an hour and a
half cramming into her stomach.
This was an around-the-clock schedule. By the time I had accomplished all the steps,
cleaned myself up, and lied awake in bed convincing myself that I was surely
going to be the cause of our precious baby’s starvation, I only had about 30
minutes to sleep before getting up and doing it all over again. I was exhausted, I was scared, and I was
slipping.
(to be continued here)
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