When Perfect Destroys Good
When we are striving hard to make everything just so, we lose the joy of doing. We become angrier and angrier at ourselves for not getting it right. We pile mistake onto mistake and berate ourselves unmercifully. At that point, the simple thing we wanted to do or the goal we set for ourselves becomes toxic — anathema — and we chalk it up as one more failure because we cannot bear to continue.
What we’re talking about here is something as simple as a recipe or as all-encompassing as choosing a partner or career. I want to show you how life-changing it can be to accept good over perfect, by sharing with you the example of my parents, Jerry and Frances, and my stepmother, Shirley.
My mother, Frances, was first generation Jewish-American. She was the daughter of Russian-German immigrants, and the baby of three children. Her older brothers were bigger both in stature (they were well over six feet while she was five-two) and age (nine and ten years older), and they doted on her. While she grew up poor in Tidewater Virginia, she was motivated enough to go to Sinai Hospital Nursing School, earn her cap, and become a superb registered nurse.
She met Jerry, a bright but quiet boy from New Jersey, when she was a nursing student. He was an intern at Johns Hopkins. They fell in love and decided to get married.
However, when Jerry introduced Frances to his parents, David and Margaret, Frances was irreparably damaged by his mother’s initial reaction. Horrified that her personal plans for her son had gone so terribly awry, Margaret made it clear that Frances was everything she did not want in a daughter-in-law.
She actually screamed at her son, “How could you do this to us!” And then promptly fainted at that first, awful meeting.
Margaret wanted the perfect match for her boy. In her mind, Jerry should have married a girl who was smarter, prettier, classier, and certainly wealthier than this plain Southern girl who was raised above a corner store. There was no room in her heart and mind for good enough. Margaret’s perfect dreams for her boy were ruined.
And for the next forty years, no matter what Frances did, said, or tried, Margaret was her blatant, supercilious enemy. Whether it was striving to be a good wife, raising my brother and me, or keeping house, Margaret relentlessly told Frances how inadequate she was at every task.
For my mother, the clothing, jewelry, furs, and magnificent house that my father bought her were how she came to measure herself against others — and against her fears. She never left the house less than perfectly dressed and coiffed, her makeup flawless even if all she was doing was going to the grocery store. My mother worked hard at “being cultured.”
Still, she always felt inadequate as though she was missing something that would make her good enough in other people’s eyes — and, therefore, her own. She never felt competent enough to deal with my father’s brilliance, nor did she understand it. And when it was clear that her children had inherited his high IQ and creativity, she felt isolated in inadequacy.
My mother was never expected to be perfect growing up. She was good, and her family was proud of her. She didn’t go to college; she went to nursing school. She didn’t start a business the way her brothers did, but she was good at her job. She was “Faygie,” (Yiddish for “little bird”) and she was loved for who she was.
My father’s story was the exact opposite. The family legend has it that, while pregnant with my father, my grandmother would sit and test out which first and middle names sounded grandest with “Dorkin, M.D.” after them. She had my father’s life planned out: He’d finish high school with honors, attend his father’s alma mater, go to the best medical school, and then return home to practice medicine in Camden NJ after graduation.
She had an iron dragon grip on everyone in the family: her husband, her younger son Arnold, and my father. Everything was perfect if you did it Margaret’s way. And if you didn’t, there was no reasoning with Margaret — you failed.
This all-or-nothing family trope guaranteed that my father would be caught in the Perfection Trap all his life. As a result, he was unable to come to his wife’s defense when his mother constantly crushed Frances’ spirit. He already knew the cost of defying his mother.
For years I wondered what it would feel like just to be accepted without judgment. To have a family that loved you no matter what, and didn’t make you pay for your failings in emotional coin. I believed I would never experience such a healing existence.
And then, along came Shirley.
The spring of 1984 brought two deaths. My grandmother finally succumbed to congestive heart failure in February at age 86. Tragically, my mother followed her only one month later, dying of a heart attack at age 59. For the first time in his life, my father was completely adrift, with no one shouting at him about not being enough. Then, a few months later, family friends introduced Dad to Shirley Wells.
Shirley was as different from my mother as one could be. Shirley could trace her ancestors back to 1620 Sweden. She grew up in Revolutionary War-tinged Haddonfield, New Jersey. She owned a horse as a child and rode as naturally as some people walk. Her first marriage had been to an architect with whom she traveled the world, and who gave her three marvelous children: Kappy, John, and Sam.
She was absolutely unself-conscious, a beautiful woman with bright aqua eyes. She’d wear a bit of lipstick and mascara, nothing else. She wore no jewelry on a regular basis except for her wedding ring and my father’s Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain around her neck.
An insightful and inventive landscape designer by trade, Shirley would cheerfully cut our lawn in jeans and bare feet — my father always worrying she’d cut off a toe. She loved music and poetry and delighted in my father’s intellectual prowess — and he blossomed under her beaming gaze. He wrote her poetry (some of which was later published), sent her a constant stream of flowers, burned up the telephone lines the year that they courted, and married her triumphantly a year after my mother died.
Shirley had never been told that perfection was her only goal, and would tell the world what she was worth. She knew that perfection was sometimes not attainable, and she knew how to love what she had. When her first husband left her, Shirley did not fall apart; she moved on. She got her landscaping credentials in her fifties. When she married Dad, she worked hard at blending the two families.
And as stepmothers go, Shirley was one of the wonderful ones. She loved me, my husband, my brother’s family and his children as if we were her own. She made it her business to give Carle and me a glorious wedding at the house the year after Dad died.
And out of everyone in the family, Shirley was the one who truly got what I did, and delighted in it. She said over and over how much of my father she saw in me, and how happy it made her. She was, first to last, a compassionate and loving human being.
Comparing Shirley and Frances is not to say that one was good and the other was not. In the beginning, both women were loved and cherished by their families. It is a clear example that perfection chasing can crush a spirit beyond repair.
If my grandmother had accepted my mother, Mom and Dad might have been able to create a true partnership — not a thirty-eight-year battle of sadness and disappointment.
Because my grandmother was not in the picture when Dad remarried, Shirley was able to make a very different marriage with him: where flaws, imperfections, and eccentricities were not things to complain about, but rather personality traits to work with, accept and even celebrate.
I encourage you to look at all the relationships you have with your family, your friends, your work, and your goals. Compassionately but unflinchingly examine all the places where perfect overcame good; where your insistence on all-or-nothing took joy, possibility and love, and turned it inside out.
Remember that every moment of possibility resides in Now. If you see places where you need to make course corrections, do it. And do so without worrying whether that takes away from perfect. Because perfection — true perfection — is in the moment. This moment is perfect. And that’s all the good you need to have at your side.
