I
grew up as the oldest of four girls. My mom was a stay-at-home mom for the most
part, and to me, she epitomized the qualities a mother should have. Before I
had kids, I didn’t find myself comparing myself to her all that often, but now
that I have young children I find myself assuming that I will do things the
same way my mom did them. Which can become a problem. Let’s take Halloween as
my most recent example. Growing up, every Halloween involved a theme and
homemade costume. One year we painted cardboard boxes so that the four girls
could be a train. I was the engine, my youngest sister was the caboose. Another
year, we were the weather. I was a cloud–dressed all in white, and my mother
sewed a fluffy white something to my back. Kate was a rainbow. Brooks was a
sunshine. Elly a raindrop. You get the picture.

Last year, my mother stepped in and made costumes
for our kids. Penny was Curious George and William was the Man with the Yellow
Hat. This year, my dad just got out of the hospital and is recovering from two
serious back operations, so the job of procuring costumes for our children fell
to me.

I brought it up with Peter a few weeks ago. “So I’m
thinking about Halloween,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “We could go to the consignment
store and find something cute.”

“I’m kind of opposed to store bought costumes.”

Peter looked at me with his eyebrows slightly
raised. “You are also somewhat opposed to anything crafty.”

He had a point. On the one hand, I want to be what I think of as the “perfect” mom. I want to be a paragon of domesticity: sewing, painting, baking, cooking. But I also want to work. I want to write and speak and teach. Being a mom and working are certainly not incompatible. And honestly, this sense of wanting to have the “perfect” home was there for me before we had children. Even then, I had a hard time keeping up with the laundry and I wished I could do a better job of planting daffodils in the spring (the first time I tried, I planted them upside down) and trying new recipes. My “perfect” selves bumped into each other. Work. Home. Church. Social life. I’ve never quite been able to achieve my own version of the perfect me.

According to dictionary.com, the word “perfect” means:

1. conforming absolutely to the description or definition of an ideal type

2. excellent or complete beyond practical or theoretical improvement

3. exactly fitting the need in a certain situation or for a certain purpose

4. entirely without any flaws, defects, or shortcomings

As a woman, and now more particularly as a mom, I have tried to live up to cultural and family ideals. I have strived for excellence. I have desired to be exactly right for every circumstance. And I have tried to deny my obvious shortcomings, flaws, and defects. This perfectionism can be somewhat innocuous and sometimes even a bit humorous in the context of yard work and Halloween costumes, but when I look back over the course of my life, I see some more serious consequences to the thought that I should strive to become the perfect version of me.

I’m not going to get into all the insidious aspects of perfection here and now (plenty more to say on this topic at a later date), but I will explain how a newfound understanding of perfection helped me overcome my Halloween woes. Over the course of the five years since Penny was born, I have thought about perfection in terms of wholeness rather than conforming to a particular social norm. And wholeness has included a sense of my own limitations as a human being, and my own needs for other people.

As I struggled with the question of Halloween costumes–not wanting to buy them in a store, but also knowing it was very unlikely that we’d be making our costumes at home this year–I remembered a picture that my mother keeps in her “Halloween album.” (Yes, my mother decorates the house for each holiday, which I do not. And yes, she has a Halloween photo album.) It’s a picture of me as a bunny, in a hand-sewn costume, and my younger sister Kate as a carrot. So last week, I called Mom. Turns out, these 30-year old costumes fit our kids. 

So in this case, I got to have my cake and eat it too. Homemade costumes that didn’t require paint, glue, or a sewing machine on my part. Homemade costumes that did require recognizing my own limitations and relying on my mother’s gifts and abilities instead of thinking I had to become her myself. You might even call it the perfect solution.