One of the critical and ongoing lessons of parenting — and, more generally, of living in the world — is that we are not our children, and they are not us. Other people have consciousnesses, and personalities, and experiences all their own. We share things, but we are not the same. Learning this is a developmental stage called self-differentiation; babies are unaware that they are not the same as their mothers for quite some time, children only slowly realize that they are not the center of the universe.
Even so: it is ridiculously hard for me not to see tremendous similarities between my kids and me and to wonder and worry about our shared habits and predispositions. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, the saying goes. And we are similar: similarities that are rooted in genetics and fostered in the daily lives we share. So I wonder how to respond when Fiona or Calliope exhibit the behaviors that frustrate me most in myself.
This morning provided a perfect example. The girls got a massive art kit from Santa (by way of Costco) and they were excited to make Christmas presents — paintings — for their great-grandparents, who arrive today from farthest Virginia. We started with watercolors, but frustration quickly mounted because the paints don’t cling as readily to the brush as the Crayola variety. I advised, “There’s nothing wrong with the brush. Maybe you need some more water, and to move the brush around in the paint a bit more,” but my advice (as usual… sulk, sulk) went ignored. Worried that they might actually ruin the brushes on their first outing, I dug around in the kit and found some paints that would be a little easier to use.
Fee planned to make a still life — a bowl of fruit. I was impressed. She got her bowl going and had a successful apple and orange before stalling out on the grapes. She couldn’t mix the purple into the shade she wanted, and then thought the individual grapes themselves were too big. So she started crying and intended to give up. To be fair, she’s sick (bronchitis!) and thus more early defeated, but I’ve seen this tantrum before.
I often joke that I learned to write because I was terrible at art. I could picture images in my head, knew exactly how I wanted them to appear, but couldn’t get my hands to cooperate. My lines were always clumsy, my colors were always off. So I gave up on the picture-making and started with the story-telling. (What’s funny, ultimately, is that though I blamed my lousy hand-eye coordination, I haven’t really done much to grow my vocabulary over the years either. So I am still left with inaccurate and inadequate descriptors; I am perhaps not so much unskilled as lazy.)
I parsed this a bit in a chapter on vocation in Hopes and Fears, the one my parents still mostly hold against me. (You guys are awesome parents.) But whether or not I blame my perfectionism on my parents or not (mostly not, though they are, ahem, just the teensiest bit prone to it themselves), I don’t want Fiona to give up so easily.
She’s such a sweet thing, though. She wanted her painting to look like the still life on the back of A Child’s Book of Art. She wanted it to be really good so she could give it to her great-grandparents for a Christmas present. I reminded her that the painting on the back of her book was painted by someone who probably worked on painting each and every day, and had been working on his or her craft for years. She could paint like that one day, maybe, but it wasn’t fair for her to expect herself to be that skilled on her first attempt.
This only worked a little comfort, so I suggested we do some sketching with pencil first — to practice making the grapes the right size and to get the banana in proportion to everything else.
She knows all this — about patience and practice — but she needs reminders sometimes. Still, an hour later she was sitting at piano practice with Miss Ellen, finishing her lesson by playing snippets of the songs sh
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e’s learned, hoping to play them well enough that her teacher can guess them. Her confidence — she is so small, any degree of proficiency or maturity she displays becomes disproportionately adorable — was so precious, and reassuring. She shuffled through her piano binder… she knew just what she wanted to find and play.
Watching her, I was reminded that this is how it goes, for all of us. It’s not just kids who experience the pitfalls of perfectionism. I am writing a book (hooray!) and I have chapter drafts due in the not-so-distant future. I am daunted. Maybe a little paralyzed. It’s not writer’s block — I know what to say — it’s terror. What if the order I put the chapter together in doesn’t work? What if the story I tell doesn’t move the narrative where I need it to go? What if?
The answer, of course, is that all those things will happen. It’s not a question of if, but when. That’s just how writing works. You write, revise, cut and move and shape and add and clarify and edit. And you can’t get anywhere if you don’t start somewhere.
That’s not how I have always worked in the past. In high school, I would write the paper and then go back and make the notecards and outlines. When I write now, I’m more often than not on some sort of deadline, so I think a sermon or article through, sit down to write it, and then send it off. That’s an okay way to get things done, but it’s not great for growing into my craft.
Needless to say, if I want Fee to develop some patience with herself and with bigger projects, I need to take my own advice. It’s bound to be a more successful strategy than trying to talk her down all the time with unheeded advice. In fact, she might even learn something more if she sees me modeling the work of diligently and patiently drafting and writing and editing, faithfully working over these ideas and stories and texts for days and weeks and months on end. I want her to know the joy of making something, of doing creative work, of putting herself out there in print, or in paint, and to be willing to practice.
She’s not me. She has her own gifts and challenges. I know that. I just want to make sure that the lessons she’s learning from me are good ones.