Good Enough Guilt

I do not have the heart of a champion. When I watch the Olympics and the announcers talk about various athletes being disappointed about getting the bronze or coming in 10th or whatever, I want to call those athletes and say, "Oh my gosh, you're the 12th best skier in the world today - congratulations! You're better than billions and billions of people!"

I'm a "good enough" sort of person. Partially because I'd rather be curled up on the couch with a book than, you know, actually working and partially because I think perfectionism can drive you insane. I tried to be perfect once - to excel at grad school and to keep a perfect house and to be a perfect wife and to look perfect - and it triggered my first flare of ulcerative colitis. And my subsequent divorce.

My "good enough" lifestyle has some benefits in parenting. My kids are really good at entertaining themselves, for example, because I'm don't feel the need to be supermom and entertain them 24/7. They're also good at doing things for themselves because I don't feel like I have to do everything for them.

The problem is that I feel terribly guilty about this.

When I was teaching - another job you can pretty much do all the time and never reach perfection with - I didn't feel bad when I happy-stamped instead of corrected homework or helped the kids earn extra recess so I could have a few more minutes to finish lesson plans.

But with motherhood, it's different.

My not-quite 4 year old does not know how to write his name. I've tried to teach him, but he LOATHES it with a deep passion that I thought he only reserved for shots. The "good enough" person in me says that it's no big deal and that he'll learn eventually and to just let it go. The mother in me feels like a failure.

And when they're all perfectly happy and I'm doing something like writing or cleaning or updating my Facebook status, I feel kind of bad about that too. Like I should be doing something creative with them, or at least talking to them. But in "good enough" world there's no earthly reason to disturb happy children.

Is there a drug out there to ease the guilt? Or to make me perfect without going crazy?

A Little Quiz

Let's suppose that your family only has one car, which your spouse HAD to take to work that day. And let's suppose that it was raining off and on. And that your double stroller was still in the back of your one car, anyway. And let's suppose that you have the world's worst headache which can only be medicated with useless Tylenol because you're five months pregnant.

Given those parameters, how would you entertain your two and three year old ?

A. Spend the day doing creative art projects, playing stimulating learning games and cooking nutritious meals together.

B. Have the nanny do creative art projects, play stimulating learning games and cook nutritious meals with the children.

C. Put the portable DVD players in each of their rooms and leave them a few snacks so you can back to bed.

D. Let them watch too much Noggin, read them a few books and half-heartedly play tea party and trains.

Please tell me you picked D. Or C. Yeah, tell me you picked C so that I can feel superior instead of lazy. You can even say B, since then I can at least feel poor instead of lazy.

If you picked A, um, please tell me that you also have a prescription painkiller addiction or something.

Thank you in advance for easing my guilt.

For Once, I Have No Guilt

Aunt Becky over at Mommy Wants Vodka has been hilariously sharing her experiences with her college roommate. Naturally, after I finished laughing hysterically, I began to reminisce about my old roommates.

During my freshmen year at BU, by the luck of the draw, I lived in an upper-classmen dorm. This dorm was a converted brownstone on a beautiful street, with very little supervision. My favorite part were the single bathrooms on each floor - when you went to take a shower, you locked the door and had the whole place TO YOURSELF. And if someone else was in there, you could just run up to another floor.

Even though being in a small dorm made it harder to meet people, my roommate Tara (another lucky frosh) and I were happy enough. Especially since the third girl who was supposed to share our room (naturally they stuck the freshmen in the only triple) never showed up and we turned her bed into a couch. After a couple of months, we had started to make friends - we had even befriended the gorgeous hockey players who lived upstairs (at BU, hockey players are gods - many of them go on to the Olympics and the NHL - so having them even know our names was amazingly cool, let alone treat us like little sisters).

Then Julie moved in. Julie was another freshmen. She had moved out of her original room because her former roommate was so prissy (she said). Even though we were upset about losing our couch, Tara and I tried to be cool. But it didn't help when Julie dropped all her stuff in the middle of the room and then left. For several days. When she returned, she had Daniel with her. Daniel was the first straight queen I had ever met.

Daniel was Julie's boyfriend. I didn't quite believe her, as he fluttered over my eyeliner collection and tossed his hair. But the next morning, when I woke up to a TOTAL view of them having sex (and may I mention that I was a virgin who'd seen one porno - I was horrified), I believed her. Especially as the sex went on and on. I tried to go back to sleep. I tried to wait them out. But after about an hour, I really had to pee. I grabbed my stuff and left. They didn't even notice.

It turned out that Julie had three boyfriends. They all seemed to know each other. She proclaimed love for all of them. She slept with all of them. She rarely showered. Tara and I were aghast. We declared that she could only have them over on weekends. A few days after that, one of the hockey players caught up with me as I was walking to the dining hall. He reported that on weeknights, since Tara and I did not permit Julie to bring her boys to our room, she'd been hooking up with them on the stairs of the brownstone. (You know the kind of stairs brownstones have, where you can see everything from spots above? That's the kind of stairs we're talking about. Nevermind that there were plenty of nooks in the hallway where a couple could have relative privacy.)

"Yeah," said my crush conversationally, "She must be a total freak. She was blowing him right there in the middle of the stairs and they didn't even notice when we came out of our rooms. You might want to talk to her about that." He looked rather intrigued, even though she was not even a tenth as pretty as most of the girls who threw themselves at him.

"Right after I talk to her about not showering. And leaving her pot in her underwear drawer. (Tara and I DID NOT search her drawers, okay? We just wanted to put her birth control pills - which she had left in the middle of the floor - away) And leaving food out for four days. She's a NIGHTMARE."

My crush looked suitably horrified. I felt a moment of glee, until I realized that everything I had mentioned was completely true and that if our dorm knew a slut lived in our room, how long would it take for the other dorms to know? And would they think it was me?

Tara and I tried to talk to Julie, we really did. But all she did was look at us with PITY and agree to clean her dirty dishes. "You just don't understand love and passion," she said when we mentioned the stairwell issue.  Well, and she started spending more time away from the room. Which was fine with us. We didn't talk to her when she was there - she started getting really smug about her love life. We started getting bitchy about her messiness, piling all of the things she left in the middle of the floor (blocking the way to my third of the room) on her bed.

Eventually the cold shoulder and the piles of crap on her bed got to her. She moved out in March.

I still don't feel guilty.