24 Jan I’m not THAT great, actually

A Late-Thirties Lesson

Think for a moment and try to identify a period in your life when you felt you could conquer the world. Or a time when you felt like you were created for something amazing and grand.

Faced with difficulty, you toughed it out and just went on, and it seemed as if the farther you went, the wiser you became, absorbing everything like a sponge. I felt like that at twenty-one.

It was the only time in my life when I was hyper-talkative in three languages, mostly about “I, myself and me”, pouring out whatever ‘brilliant’ thoughts crossed my ‘brilliant mind.’

I remember when a philosopher-friend in France covered my mouth with his hand because he couldn’t get a word in.

Fortunately, life has its way of teaching even the most resistant and self-centered humans precious (life) lessons…. most of us will eventually wake up to reality and realize that, actually, we’re not THAT great and not THAT versatile.

Before hitting mid-thirties, I had heard my friends complain about how their perception of themselves and their abilities changed sharply at around that age.

All of a sudden, they became acutely aware that, although they can do a lot of things in their lives, there is also a host of other things they will never achieve or experience.

Suddenly, they reported, they woke up and beheld a sea of doubt and self-questioning within themselves. All while being in perfect mental health and in their prime otherwise.

I must report that I have been experiencing something of that sort too. It isn’t life-changing in the immediate sense of the term. It has nothing to do with wishing I were somewhere else/doing something else. Not at all.

I thank God every day for all the people around me and everything I have because I’m literally living out my dream: I feel loved and needed on a daily basis and get unlimited hugs and kisses 24/7.

All three of my kids are affectionate and loving and my husband is great company.

Still, I have (finally) realized, with great clarity, that not only will I never accomplish a few things I had vaguely entertained in my mind (like being a diplomat), but also (and this is somewhat painful to admit) I’m waaaay more imperfect than I had trained myself to believe all these years.

When I was younger, I excelled at school. I took part in academic competitions, reaping a number of rewards and pats on the back. I accelerated my degrees both at Dartmouth and at the University of Montreal.

I was busy, I was an A student. Thus I also learned to perceive myself as “hard-working”.

But, that was twelve years ago. Reality check has been long overdue. I need to do some serious work on the “here and now” and take a fresh look at my persona.

These days, I’m quite busy with the kids while juggling a few work hours. I try to make sure our house is reasonably clean, dinners cooked, shopping done, lessons taught, translations project completed.

Yet, it has also dawned upon me that although I surely am busy, I’m not the same hard-working and conscientious person any more.

I do lots of things half-heartedly because I feel that if I didn’t, they would take up too much time at the expense of other things, meaning that I would eventually fail to fit them all into my schedule.

There’s some truth to this and all parents of young children know that they should steer clear of perfectionism.

But it can also become and excuse and something detrimental in the long-run. Even when given enough time for a particular task, I might still fail to be completely on it and dismiss it hastily to get it over with.

Plus, I’m struggling full time between chaos and order, order and chaos. I have come up with many solutions to keep some of the chaos under control, but it still gets the better of me. I do not do things in logical order. I have problems with sequences and consistency in general. I do the same things differently every time for no reason.

To illustrate my imperfection and challenges in a (hopefully) slightly more entertaining way, below are a few complaints read off the minds of those closest to me (somewhere deep inside I would not like these  projections of mine to be true…. but they most likely are):

“My wife’s cooking has been so predictable and boring. She embarks upon her evening cooking with an invariable groan “oh, cooking again” and opts for one of those “run-of-the-mill” recipes. I’m not excited about opening the lunch tupperware at work any more.”

“Mum sometimes gets so stuck at home she doesn’t want to take us to the park. She rarely indulges in creative mess with us.”

“I cringe when I see her drive out of the garage every morning. No wonder their car sports a few bruises.”

“This woman hardly ever responds to text messages in a timely manner. She offers a lame excuse that ‘she’d tossed her phone somewhere random’ and doesn’t call back until the next day.”

“She seems intellectual but when I ask her about the books she’s been reading, she says she now reads only five books a year and she can hardly describe the last one she read.”

“Gosh, she’s so chaotic as a tutor. The moment you take your seat, she rushes out to fetch tea, then to get a cd player, or bring a missing pencil like she couldn’t do this earlier. She must have some attention-deficit disorder that hasn’t been officially diagnosed yet.”

“You wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve seen her kids licking their dropped food off the kitchen floor.”

“She doesn’t stock her pantry the way a decent housekeeper should. And she hasn’t planted anything in her yard. It’s all mud and weeds, what a sorry sight!”

“She assigns homework and then it goes right out of her mind.”

“She prays to Me regularly, but her prayers are chaotic and unfinished, at random times of the day. Sometimes it feels like being fed leftovers.”

The consolation is that God can work His way through my weaknesses and shortcomings. From what I know from a number of wise and faith-filled people, He operates through all of our imperfect cracks:  this is how you let God so that He can actually take over the show.