Today I’ve dropped a few balls already. And it’s barely 8am.
I forgot to line up a babysitter for my youngest child tonight so we can go to a back-to-school BBQ. And my son has basketball try-outs in a suburb 20 minutes away and I offered to drive carpool. By my count those are three big conflicts that will need to get sorted today. Oops.
I forgot to send a few important work emails last night. Nothing super urgent, but work needed to move balls forward. Oops.
I didn’t sign up for an exercise class this morning – assuming I’d go for a run tonight – and now I have plans, which I forgot, which will get in the way of exercise. Assuming I figure out a solution for the trifecta of conflicts tonight. Oops.
None of these oops are world-ending. They will all work themselves out. But, oops like these can build in aggregate and accrue to a feeling of “Am I doing anything right???”
My message to myself – and to you – is, of course. You are doing SO much right. Life is busy and there are simply too many balls. Some are naturally going to drop. The best we can do is try not to drop the REALLY critical ones, pick up the important dropped ones quickly, and embrace that some of the balls should never have been juggled in the first place.
I was reminded of a story I told a group of women at work recently regarding Kristen Anderson-Lopez, one of the songwriters for the Academy Award winning movie, Frozen. I read about her story recently in Charles Duhigg’s book “Smarter, Faster, Better.”
There’s a lot to love about Frozen. The writers wanted to create a movie beyond the traditional fairy tale – not relying on a prince to save the day with a kiss as the definition of true love. Instead, they wanted the film to say something bigger. Girls don’t need to be saved by Prince Charming, they can save themselves.
As Kristen and her songwriter husband were struggling creatively with how to bring the story to life via song, Kristen asked, “What would it feel like if you were Elsa? What if you tried to be good your entire life and it didn’t matter because people constantly judged you?”
As described in the book, “Kristen knew this feeling. She had felt other parents’ looks when she let her daughter eat ice cream instead of healthy snacks. She’d felt glances when she and her husband let their girls watch an iPad inside a restaurant because they wanted a moment of peace. Perhaps she wasn’t cursed with a deadly power – but she knew what it felt like to be judged. It didn’t feel fair. It wasn’t her fault she wanted a career. It wasn’t her fault she wanted to be a good mom and a good wife and a successful songwriter, and so, inevitably, that meant things like home-packed snacks and sparkling dinner conversations – not to mention thank-you notes and exercise and replying to emails – sometimes fell by the wayside. She didn’t want to apologize for not being perfect. She didn’t think she needed to.”
Kristen said “Elsa has tried to do everything right, all her life. Now she’s being punished for being herself and the only way out is for her to stop caring, to let it all go.”
And then….the popular chorus was created:
Let it go, let it go.
That perfect girl is gone.
This story speaks to me perfectly – on the importance of not striving for perfection. And the power of letting go of unrealistic expectations and being hard on ourselves. And absolutely, never, ever judging each other.
Today will be a “good enough” day – I have many of them. But I take faith that my “good enough” is pretty damn good.
The Redefining 