David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

Goodbye, Anne (2009-2019)

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On June 23, 2009, Molly gave birth to four kittens. They were tiny and always seemed sickly. Sometime Thursday, the last one of them died. Anne was the only one to make it to 10 years old.

A couple of weeks after their birth, one of the kittens died without an explanation, but three of them lived to become Charlotte, Emily and Anne. They loved to sleep on books, so they were named for the writing Brontë sisters.

In 2015, Emily became the first of the sisters to die, with no explanation. In 2016, Charlotte died, too, again with no warning or explanation. Their remaining sister, Anne, died while I was gone to work today. She seemed perfectly fine this morning, but she was cold and still when I arrived home.

There seems to have been something tragic in the genes of that family, because their Aunt Bessie — named for my own Great Aunt Bessie — died without explanation or warning last year.

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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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