Nobody is Perfect
Not even you.
Yes, you.
You may have your children in the most coveted Montessori school in town. You may feed them Annie’s organic cheddar bunnies instead of those red-40 laden Cheez-Its. You may rinse them after swimming because skin is, after all, the largest organ. You may keep them from sleepovers with questionable families, from public restrooms, from rated PG-13 movies for the potty humor, from food preservatives, and from Internet predators.
But, you are not perfect.
You can watch the children out the window each and every moment they are out in the yard and you can listen in to their phone conversations and you can wash their clothes with seven rinses and you can run a Hepa filter in your home and you can avoid antibacterial products and you can refuse vaccines and you can hand brush their teeth with non-fluoride toothpaste and you can remove sharp objects from their rooms and you can sit in their Sunday School class to make sure they aren’t being taught heresy and you can screen the babysitters.
You can hold an MBA or a Jurist Doctorate or attend night classes to improve your mind and you can do yoga five to six times a week and you can drink nasty green whole food type drinks and you can wear a wide brim in the sun and slather your hinterparts with 75 SPF sunscreen and you can marry Mr. Right and you can rise early and you can cook from scratch.
But you still aren’t perfect.
The problem is, you want to be perfect. I do, too.
That’s why we feel guilty at night. And around three in the afternoon. And just before dinner.
Do you like feeling guilty?
Me neither.
So give it up. Not the trying part, just the perfect part. Nobody even likes perfect. Just ask Barbie.
Ana, am so glad this spoke to you today. Be encouraged.
Thank you so much for this awesome post. I am in tears right now because it hits home so much for me!
I have no energy left at the end of the day, and I have been realizing that it is because I spend my whole day trying to be a perfect mom, and a perfect employee, and a perfect mom, sister, daughter…If I could only make peace with the fact that it is ok and totally human to NOT be perfect!!! Thanks again!!
This is a great post and a very good reminder on how to erase mommy guilt for us all. More moms should take notes on this because no matter how much we do and try to control we are only human and not perfect. Who wants to be perfect anyway?
What we learn then?
Good thoughts, Demo, although I admit I wasn’t thinking about salvation here. More along the lines of the Mommy-has-to-be-perfect-every-moment-of-her-life bug that has been infecting moms for about a decade. Or in my case, a decade and a half. Plus a year. And a few months.
(On the other hand, maybe you’re onto something: As Christians, while we are called to a perfect, sinless life, we can’t obtain it, thus our need for Christ who was perfect and blameless for us. Where does that put us? Are we to even try to be perfect? Is perfection our goal? Where does my effort stop and God’s start? Or is that backwards? Is obsession with our sin and lack of ‘perfection’ distracting us from our kingdom work?) Big questions for 4 a.m.
Interestingly, this kind of wrestling with sin for perfection is what made George Whitefield love Calvinism. He began to doubt his own salvation as he found he couldn’t completely mortify his sin while he was ministering with Charles and John Wesley. He said that he didn’t know the true nature of religion until he was introduced to the Doctrines of Grace.
Wow, I read a practical article like this, and preachers come to mind. What has Bethlehem College & Seminary done to me!?
It does. But first I have to figure out how:)
Amy–let’s write a book called “Letting Go of Mommy Guilt”. I bet we’d make a million. (It might be therapeutic for me. . .
Then we can write a book called “Balance: Helping Mommies Find It”. That’d be our second million. Sound good?