We both flirt with the Never Enough world, despite our steadfast devotion to Good Enough. We can’t help it — we’re not perfect, not even at being imperfect. And what’s more, it’s sometimes the silliest things that bring out our perfectionist streaks.
Like children’s birthday parties.
Hollee’s idea of “simple” one year, when she was celebrating her youngest son’s fifth birthday, was to keep the guest list to 50 (including parents) and outsource it to a gymnastics facility. She picked up 10 pizzas, as well as a half-sheet cake from her favorite bakery, on the way to soiree. It was certainly easier than when she arranged for her other son to throw out the first pitch at a Washington Wild Things Frontier League baseball game in celebration of his big day — two years in a row.
Becky’s all-time high for insanity came when she invited 80 guests to her home when her youngest turned 3. Although the homemade penguin invitations she made one year for a “March of the Penguins” party were a close second, followed by the times she hosted nearly 20 children at the Rainforest Café, took groups of girls (and their dolls) to the America Girl Café — and planned an elaborate spy-themed scavenger hunt using invisible ink, decoder rings and GPS.
Both of us have sweated it out over guests lists, spent more than the appropriate amount of time selecting cakes — and Hollee even found herself overcome with guilt the first year she used Evite, rather than handwritten invitations.
It’s funny that we do this, given how attentive we are to reining in our Type-A tendencies in other areas. After all, the extensive research we did for our book on working motherhood taught us that perfectionism can be a tremendous liability. Women who take a “Good Enough” approach tend to be more successful, both at work and at home.
So why do we allow ourselves to become overachieving Never Enoughs — over birthday parties, of all things? Because we, too, are susceptible to the thing that leads other women onto the perfectionist hamster wheel: We can’t completely shake the desire to impress other people. Deep down, we still sort of care what the other moms think — even though we have piles of research that tells us that we’re far better off focusing on our own priorities and expectations.
It’s why Hollee worried so much about sending those Evites. Yes, part of it was guilt: She felt like she was capitulating, admitting that she just didn’t care enough to head out to a store, or to an overpriced online invitation site, to find the perfect envelope. (Does this say something about how much I cherish my child? she asked herself.) And, yes, there were practical concerns, like having the emails diverted to spam filters. But, mostly, Hollee worried whether the moms at her kids’ new school would find an electronic invitation to be a bit, well, gauche.
The fact is, we all have a bit of the people-pleasing perfectionism in us. Awareness helps, though — and we’re learning to dial down our event planning to better fit our lives and our own priorities.
And that, we’ve decided, is Good Enough.
Becky and Hollee’s new book, Good Enough Is the New Perfect: Finding Happiness and Success in Modern Motherhood, is available for pre-order on Amazon and they blog about parenting and work/life balance at TheNewPerfect.com.
