We were joking the other night, about how Dan’s 91 year old mother puts me on a pedestal. I often say, “man it’s gonna hurt when I fall….It’s a long way down.” Last night she began telling me I was perfect…UGH. When we were alone I said to Dan, “Yeah, I’m so perfect. You know if you put Im in front of perfect you get IMPERFECT.”

Because of course, perfection is an ideal that someone has, and I don’t want to ever be it, lol. I prefer to be the imperfect me. The one who spills wine, and loses her keys, and laughs at herself, and her friends. Geezus. Perfection is highly overrated as far as I’m concerned. I mean, isn’t there always another level?

My ex was a perfectionist of sorts. He wanted everyone to be perfect. Of course that bar did not apply to himself. And finally, I refused to let it apply to me and my son. Guess we all know how his quest for perfection in others ended up.

I found that striving for perfection often led to nothing getting done. Often, in the quest to do something perfectly, or be the perfect whatever (wife, son, husband, employee, student, etc.) we are stopped dead in our tracks and nothing gets done because perfection can’t be achieved. At least that’s how it’s worked for me.

I’ll work myself silly to get something done the way I think it should be done. But I won’t get hung up on small stuff that doesn’t matter in the long run because I want the project to move forward. When I worked, I was once assigned to spend a couple of days on preparing a quotation as thick as a book for a company in China. There was so much “make work” paperwork associated with this, that it took two of us at least 2 days. At the end of the 2^nd day, as we were printing out the hard copies which had to be sent via Fedex to the customer, my boss noticed that the ink color in the logo was off by a tiny shade. Something so small that no one, not the VP, not the product or sales manager, or any of the other staff could even notice. It was now 6 PM, Fedex came at 7, if the quotation wasn’t ready by 7 it couldn’t go, would be late and not accepted by the customer. He stopped production of this million dollar quote, to get the color right on the copy that was being emailed. IT had to come in and fix it, which put the rest of us under pressure because it had to be coalated, packaged, addressed, etc, etc., etc.

I don’t get caught up in that type of stuff. It’s absurd, as if anyone who was receiving it was going to notice, or even knew what color the logo should be. A serious waste of time, adding serious stress to the people trying to complete the project on time.

Imperfection is often perfection. I think we are all imperfect people, if we are honest, and hopefully all trying to raise and meet the bar on our own. But don’t get hung up in the small stuff, that doesn’t matter.

Back to Dan’s mother, I know she is just so happy that her son has found someone that she builds me up in her mind because it makes her happy. That’s ok…I can deal with that. But like I said, if she ever finds out a truth that changes the way she sees me, it’s gonna be a long hard fall from grace. I’ll try not to disappoint her….but I won’t be perfect, ever. Dan knows that, thankfully. He seems to love me in spite of the fact that I sometimes can’t remember shit that he says five minutes after he says it. Getting old sucks.