30 Days of Thanks: Being right where I am

I’ve been thankful for many things recently.  I just haven’t been posting about them.  I have draft upon draft saved, but I haven’t posted.

I was talking to my best friend (the previously-featured V) the other day.  She phoned just as I was slopping a roller around in a paint tray.  I managed to get paint all over the phone (to my husband’s annoyance), but that’s beside the point. I mentioned that I was painting, and she asked how Bean’s room looked. I admitted that I was still working on it.

I started painting Bean’s room a couple of weeks ago.  It was bubble-gum pink when we moved in, so pink that my head hurt just walking into the room.  I wanted to paint it a nice pale lavender: girly, but calm.  I started with a primer, because that pink was serious.

The primer took a while because it was fumeriffic, and I get headaches easily.  The room took two coats of primer, and then some serious airing-out was in order.  Then it rained for several days.  And of course, as I mentioned to V, I’m lazy.

V’s reply?  “I don’t think you’re lazy.  I think you’re a perfectionist.”

And she’s right.  Those little globs of paint that get on the ceiling, no matter how careful I am?  Make me crazy.  I told my husband at one point that I’d painted the room really sloppily.  He walked into the room, looked around, and asked just where the “sloppy” was.  After I pointed out the barely-visible problem areas, he laughed and reminded me that it’s our 3-year-old’s bedroom, and if he couldn’t see the flaws, then she definitely wouldn’t.

And that’s me, all summed up.  I start out with these really high expectations of myself – expectations that no one else shares – and then I get annoyed with myself for not doing it exactly right.  So I stop, rather than continue with a shoddy job.  My husband used to sit next to me while I would type and type and type, only to highlight all of my text and delete it with one keystroke.   My explanation was always something along the lines of, “I decided it wasn’t very good.”  He, who edits and tinkers but never simply deletes, was incredulous.

I see this in Bean, who amazed us all by reading by the time she was 2 1/2 and now, at 3 1/2, reads the Ramona Quimby books with ease and devours the comic pages when the paper arrives each day.  She started writing right around the time she turned 3 last spring, and her writing is astounding.  She writes long words and she pieces shorter words together into long sentences.  Last summer, certain letters were a constant source of frustration for her.  She would write words, then get to a letter like N or R, and would end up balling the paper up and throwing it away, shouting, “It’s not a very good R!  I’m bad at this!”  Then she would storm away, furious with herself.

No matter how many times I assured her that letters take practice, that they can be very difficult, and that she was only 3 years old so any writing was a really big accomplishment, she still flew into a kid-rage when faced with a challenging letter.  She didn’t toil away patiently, knowing that it would take time and that she would get it right eventually.  She started, got frustrated with her less-than-perfect result, then stomped away angrily.

Like me with those paint globs.  And with my writing.  And my ugly but delicious homemade pie crusts, which will never be on the cover of Martha Stewart Living but are made with love and are wholesome and very tasty.

So today, I’m thankful for just being where I am.  Because where I am is really pretty great.

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