David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

family

Pursuit of perfection leaves me feeling shame when I’m flawed

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I’m terrified of not being perfect.

Admitting that scares me. Talking about the concept makes me look around to make sure nobody is listening. I don’t want to talk about it, because I know my beliefs about it are contradictory and self-defeating. It’s even worse to admit this to you.

I found out Wednesday night that I made a mistake at work last month. I sent a couple thousand dollars that should have gone to one company to somebody else instead. I’ll go over a transaction in detail at the office tomorrow to be sure, but I’m almost positive I screwed something up.

The problem can be fixed, so nobody’s going to lose any money, but I am humiliated. It happened because we don’t have adequate controls in place for this one particular thing, but I’m still the one who failed to handle this one transaction in a different way.

You see, I’m not supposed to make mistakes. Never.

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Most prizes feel empty, because our real need is for connection

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We come into this life craving connection.

Before we know anything about the world — who we are, who our parents are, how we fit into a family — we instinctively reach out to connect with people around us. Our little fingers grasp whoever reaches out for us.

The most important connection we need from the beginning is with our mother. We want her touch. We crave her attention. We need her breast. We listen for her voice. We eagerly crave her love. We need her approval and her presence.

We quickly crave connection with both parents (or substitutes) and maybe with an extended family. We want to be loved. We need to belong. We crave connection.

For many of us, something goes wrong along the way — and we spend years or decades trying to find whatever was lost. We can be confused about what we need. We can seek substitutes. We can chase achievements that seem as though they might satisfy our needs. But something is still missing.

For me, all of the connection I eagerly crave today goes back to what was lost when I was a little boy — and I understand now that it started when I lost my mother.

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My mother was more impressive than my father led me to believe

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My father loved to make fun of my mother about things from their college years.

He always started such stories by telling me that he didn’t want to say anything bad about my mother — but then he would proceed to tell a story designed to make her look bad.

When I was a child, he seemed to see their children both as pawns of their arguments and also the prizes of the game. He was terrified of her winning custody of us, so he subtly poisoned our attitudes about Mother, all the while pretending to be sympathetic to her.

His stories about their college years centered around the narrative that she was incompetent and that everyone knew it. He implied that he was the respected one and that people laughed at her.

I grew up with their college yearbooks on our bookshelves, so I looked at them many times. But one of my sisters ended up with those books and I haven’t seen them for many years.

Last night, I discovered that Jacksonville State University has all of its yearbooks online, so I downloaded the books from the years both of my parents were there. I quickly found myself re-evaluating my narrative about my mother — once again.

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