Scene: Kids watching Scoob. Mey folding laundry with purpose (think staccato). Hubby walks through the door.
“Hello family! O-Bear, how was your one-on-one Tae Kwon Do with Master Choi today?”
Before O-Bear can answer, Mey says matter-of-factly, “We didn’t have Tae Kwon Do today.” She doesn’t even look up from forming her neat little stacks.
Hubby shrugs, “Oh, ok. Well, it was on the family calendar. You calendared it and sent it to me.”
Mey stops her frantic folding, picks up her work phone, and glances at her calendar. “Nope, not here.”
She picks up her personal phone, and from the look on her face, Hubby immediately moves to consolation mode, soothing voice and strong arms, in preparation for the fallout, most likely involving tears.
“Mey, it’s ok. It’s no big deal. I’ll take care of it. I’ll email Master Choi, and we can set up another session. You are not a failure.”
But it’s too late.
On the outside looking in, Mey goes into “fix it” mode, emailing Master Choi with effusive apology.
On the inside, failure is already on loop.
You’re a terrible mom. How could you forget her session? What is wrong with you? Get it together! This is so disrespectful to Master Choi. Why didn’t you just forward the calendar invite to your work address? Why didn’t you check your personal phone calendar?
Failure.
Failure.
Failure.
But was it really?
Because what we did instead was have a picnic in our backyard with our Chik-fil-a, “cheers-ing” our lemonade and seeing how many fries we could fit into our mouths and still chew.
Because while listening to toddler chatter, which sort of sounds like chipmunk, I realized that Orion’s vocabulary has improved (at least more understandable) as he gushed about Ms. Bunor (one of his teachers) and his favorite (girl?)friend, Teagan. He is two, by the way.
Because away from the noise of my phones and alarms and reminders and schedules, I could see how mature Olivia has become, as she explained to her brother why we could not eat at Chik-fil-a due to the virus, as she tried to lift him up to show me how strong she is.
Because I was asked to kiss their boo-boos: Orion’s neck-scratch and Olivia’s belly-scrape, one of which was a tumble on the playground – the other, the result of Toddler Fight Club. (I’ll let you guess who was who.)
Yeah, maybe I did fail……
….if failure is as narrowly and unfairly defined as I have defined in the past — as any mistake, as any deviation from plan, as any uncontrolled factor in life – as a “loss” in my made-up zero sum game.
But in my journey toward grace, self-compassion and trying to create new neural pathways for positive thinking, what I “failed” or “lost” was inconsequential. Yes, I missed a 15-min Tae Kwon Do virtual lesson for my 4 year old. At the same time:
What I gained was an irrevocable and irreplaceable evening of presence with my most favorite little humans in the entire universe
In my little “failure,” I actually received a gift and found magic.
I hope you can find some magic in the mundane or even better, a mistake.
Literally, almost in tears reading this. I relate to this so much. You are a gift! This is something I do all the time and is a good reminder to see the silver lining. Perspective!
Your comments give me life! Seriously. So many times when I write, I think that I’m probably the only person who thinks this way. Knowing that I’m not alone helps so much – so thank you! xoxo