Daily Archive

Some readers didn’t quite catch on to the twisted brand of sarcasm I used in my post, “Baby Steps are for Babies.” That’s okay. I understand. Many times I’m being what I think is wryly funny and my family looks at me like I’m speaking an antiquated dialect of Sanskrit.

I ran across an error in logical reasoning called the Nirvana Fallacy. I seem to fall victim to its romantic idea of utopia frequently. Harold Demsetz coined the phrase in 1969 when he said (read this out loud in your best ‘local newscaster voice’) :

The view that now pervades much public policy economics implicitly presents the relevant choice as between an ideal norm and an existing ‘imperfect’ institutional arrangement. This nirvana approach differs considerably from a comparative institution approach in which the relevant choice is between alternative real institutional arrangements.

Huh? That’s gonna take some serious thought-time to work through. I like Voltaire’s approach much better:

Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

“The better is the enemy of the good.” It’s often misquoted as “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

I had to learn “good enough mothering” as a young mom. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do everything perfectly for my baby every day. There was always some point during the day when I just couldn’t read one more story; push the swing one more time; smile my way through one more pile of laundry. That didn’t mean I wasn’t cut out to be a mom and it would have been better for me not to have kids at all, it means in my human imperfection, I came to the end of myself and had to find strength outside my own to get through the day, hour, minute at hand.

I have to constantly beat back the idea that I can do anything perfectly. I often feel that doing just “well enough” is laziness—that I’m not really applying myself to the task at hand, no matter what that task is. A pan that refuses to let go of a chunk of burnt on food is not failure, it’s an opportunity to perhaps discover a new method of removing burnt-on food. A son who insists on one box of saltines a week is not due to my failure to educate and nourish him properly, it’s just a hungry kid who wants to eat something he likes.

Here’s my deep, dark secret. My perfectionism isn’t really a desire to be perfect. It’s an excuse at-the-ready for my all too frequent shortcomings. I am all too well acquainted with my own humanity; all too familiar with my own sloth. Knowing I am destined to fail somehow, sometime, allows me to dream big and then totally abandon the dream at the first sign of humiliation.

But it’s not all humiliation and broken dreams. Like I said about finding strength outside myself, I am learning day by day to give my dreams to One larger than myself. He loves me despite my imperfections and failings, and uses my shortcomings for good!

My kids are wild about this song. I’m so glad she wrote this song. Sometimes I think she wrote it just for them. It can’t be easy living with me!