I try

Nobody’s perfect.
That’s what Osgood says at the end of Some Like it Hot, my favourite Marilyn Monroe movie. Of course, he says it to Jack Lemmon who has been posing as a woman, but, the sentimentality of the statement is a basic truth of life. Nobody’s perfect.

I’d like to think that there have been times in my life where I have been “perfect”. I’ve been perfectly polite, perfectly clear, perfectly happy, perfectly horrid. I’ve even been so broken and bruised that my agony and heartache has been perfectly beautiful. Yes, agony can be beautiful.

But, I’m not a perfect wife, or mother. Nor sister nor daughter. I, like all humans, have made mistakes. Some tiny, barely a blip and easily passed over and some catastrophic and very nearly game-changers.

Tonight I sat waiting for my husband to join me at the cardiologist for his one year follow up appointment and I began to muse to myself about the fickle nature of life. Much like a Shonda Rhimes television series, you should never get too comfortable, because that’s exactly when something huge changes to make you re-evaluate everything. I thought about times in my life where I grew too complacent with the status quo and how that affected my decisions. I thought about the people who have influenced me, for good and for bad. I thought about friends I’ve lost and loved ones who’ve died and I thought a lot about how our lives have changed since last year, when it was only 2013 that we left the lives that we knew in Ontario and moved out East here to start over. I had thought then that the really BIG life events as I knew them were no longer going to be about Shawn and I, but about the kids. How I was wrong.

As I sat and allowed my entirely too over-active and over-analyzing brain to throw me down the familiar paths of self-criticism and scrutiny, I stopped for a moment and had a bit of a truth hit me. One of the things that makes me craziest, whether we are talking about my kids telling me that they ‘can’t help’ with a chore because they ‘don’t know’ how to do something or someone I know singing a similar song, is when people give up. Or expect someone else to do for them. I’m a hard worker. My parents were hard workers. My husband is a hard worker. I respect that and I get deeply upset when others don’t, or worse, expect that others will do for them when they are capable.

In short, I try.

And Shawn tries. I think this is how we got through such a major life event as we did, especially such a hard one. We tried. We worked and we talked and sometimes we even yelled and cried. But we tried. And now here we are one year from a huge game changer and we’re doing okay. And maybe, just maybe, I need to stop analyzing myself all the time and being so hard on myself. Because even if I make mistakes once in a while and even if I hurt or I’m mean or awful or cranky, in the long run, I’m a do-er. I work hard.

I try.

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