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Like many parents today, I thought long and hard before making the decision to bring a child into this world.It’s funny to me that this is a rather new way of doing things. I think my mom’s generation was the last in which many woman were having children just because it was expected of them. You didn’t have to psychoanalyze yourself to figure out if you’d be a competent parent. You just had the babies and figured you’ d learn on the way.

Now, most of the parents I know go through a period of deep introspection as well as getting the college degrees, setting up viable careers and making sure the marriage is good and healthy before embarking on parenthood.

Even with my carefully laid plans there are still moments when I feel woefully ill-equipped to be a parent. So many of the things I want to teach Charlie so he’ll have a happy life, I’m struggling with myself. Things like how to organize and manage time, finish projects even when they become difficult, let things go when they don’t turn out the way I planned, deal with emotions in a healthy manner. The list goes on and on.

Luckily, there seems to be a grace period built in. The first year was all about keeping Charlie safe and healthy. I don’t think he had any idea that the kitchen was a mess most of his first year or that I constantly misplaced car keys, socks and shoes, sippy cups. Just about anything I needed for an outing required ten additional minutes of preparation. My real worry was that he would sense my stress and this would bend his little brain in ways I wouldn’t be able to repair later.

As it turned out, Charlie didn’t seem very sensitive to any of this. As long as he was fed and allowed to nap (which he was happy doing anywhere), he seemed completely unaffected by everything else.

I know this grace period is coming to a close. We’re more careful about what we say around him. I’m starting to put some kind of organizational system in place so he doesn’t grow up in the midst of chaos, and I’m trying to model good behavior by not getting so frustrated when I make a mistake or can’t find my car keys. It’s hard. And to be honest, I don’t think I’m going to be perfect by the time he’s two, which is when I imagine the grace period will be closed or nearly closed.

Then I figure I’ll just have to have faith that overall we’re giving Charlie a happy, healthy environment to grow up in and everything will turn out fine. Maybe that’s the most important lesson to teach Charlie anyway.

For my birthday I wanted to go to the beach with Dave and Charlie, one of the less crowded beaches in a state park, untarnished by condos and beach bars.I thought that for once I had everything pretty well planned. I had a beach bag packed from the last time we went to the beach and I planned to keep things simple, no fancy picnic and just the bare minimum of what we’d need to have a good time.

I had things under control until we were ten minutes away from heading out the door. I couldn’t find our beach pass. I looked everywhere and with each minute that went by without finding it, I became more and more miserable.

The self-belittling refrain began – the one that tells me how I’m a mess, how I’m never going to raise a happy, competent kid if my own life isn’t in order.  I try and try and it always ends up like this – me running around trying to find things at the last minute, stressed out and miserable.

I know that the solution to this problem is to put systems in place and stick with them and I’ll probably blog about that later, but this post is about the insidious danger of chronic perfectionism.

When I was a kid in elementary school, I compulsively checked my school bag in the morning at the house, in the car on the way to school, and then at school up until the homework assignment finally got turned in. I would check my bag it twenty or more times in a morning. Even so, I would occasionally forget things, and when I did, I was emotionally devastated.

I am on constant lookout for this behavior in Charlie, and if I see it I’ll head it off the best I can. I’m already a little worried about how quickly he gets frustrated when things don’t work for him. He’ll try some new mechanism such as buckling a belt and if it doesn’t do what he wants the first time, he reacts by screaming and throwing himself down on the ground to lie there flat with his red cheek pressed to the floor.

This is how I feel when I can’t find my car keys.

So what can I teach Charlie to make things easier for him, even while I’m still dealing with the same problems myself? First, that everything in life isn’t going to work immediately just how he wants it to and that his control over the world is limited.  Then I’ll teach him how to put systems in place to maintain the limited amount of control he has. As he learns more and refines his systems, he’ll have more control and get more satisfaction out of life.

Heh, I just had to giggle at the idea of a toddler refining his systems. I guess that could lead to problems of its own.

Luckily, there seems to be a grace period, time for me to get my act together before Charlie starts picking up all my bad habits. We got to the beach for my birthday (paying full admission price) and I was a real grouch the rest of the day. I have a lot of bad habits to work on. I hope Charlie can be patient.