"I bet anything she's pregnant," said Mark as we left a get together with friends in the years long before recovery.  Having been through a pregnancy recently ourselves at that point, we knew what to look for: the change in eating habits, the hand unconsciously and lovingly resting over a still flat stomach...

"Totally," I agreed, "But they must not be telling people the news yet."

"You remember that time they said that they didn't think it was possible to tell when someone was at the beginning of a pregnancy?"

"And we did think it was!  Oh, I do!  I really want to tell them 'I told you so,' but we ought to let them share the news in their own time.  But if we do wait, they'll never believe we knew."

"We ought to write it down!  Then we can prove that we knew."

"I know what we should do!  We'll write it down and seal it in an envelope and mail it to ourselves.  That way it will have the postmark with the date on it.  I've heard people do that as a cheap and easy way to copyright their writing."

Mark agreed that this was the most fantastic and foolproof idea he'd ever heard.  So, we being the not-so-mature or spiritually enlightened, but at least very clever, individuals we were, did just that.  And after our friends finally shared their good news with us, we were able to produce the envelope with a flourish and seal our reputations, both as greatly insightful predictors of pregnancy and as gigantic dorks.  Whatever.  The important thing was: we were right!

And we made them laugh, which was a relief, because it doesn't always happen that way.  Needing to be right can be seriously annoying.  It's a big glaring character defect of mine, and like most of my character defects, it's born of fear: the fear that I don't know what's real, that I can't trust myself or my own perceptions.  External validation is the rock on which I build my church to the fickle God of other people's opinions.

Over the years, in so many of my relationships, I haven't been able to hold on to my truth.  I'd state what I saw and be told I didn't see it, state what I felt to be told I didn't feel it, and I'd begin to doubt my own eyes and my own heart.  If you say the sky is blue and everyone else around you says it's red, how long before you get your eyes checked?  How long before you begin to wonder if you actually know what blue looks like?  How long before you start to call it red too?  And when someone whispers to you, "No, it is blue, and I have proof..."  That's when the "I was right and I have proof" victory dance begins.  The one that seems inexplicable to the pleasantly surprised and bemused pregnant woman you're confronting with an irrefutable postmarked envelope.

Last week, I was sitting cross-legged on my plump little black cushion on the floor of the Zendo I visit regularly and listening to a talk about cleaning incense burners.  And as I listened, the very deep and profound thought that came to me was, "I seriously am never going to volunteer to clean incense burners at this place."  It wasn't that the task sounded unpleasant — it didn't — but the volunteers who hadn't done it right, who hadn't been sufficiently thorough in their cleaning, were the subject of the dharma talk.  Yikes!  Wouldn't want to be those guys!

Now the leader of the Zendo... (Or is it master or priest or teacher? I never know, because everyone refers to him as Bob, which sounds odd when trying to put him in context.)  In any case, Bob had built his talk around these slacker volunteers — who remained nameless (but they knew who they were...) — who were occasionally leaving little butt-ends of incense in the burners.

Bob wanted to make the point that we need to put our whole hearts and our full effort into everything we do.  But instead of being inspired, I was thinking, "Damn, that job cleaning the incense burners sounds like way too much pressure.  Not only that, everything sounds like way too much pressure.  I've already tried to put my 'full effort' into everything.  It's what led me to crawl, broken and bleeding, into both the rooms of 12 Step and this damn Zendo.  This is so not a good talk for a recovering perfectionist to hear..."

At the end of the talk, there were questions, and as I struggled to formulate mine, someone else asked it for me.  "I don't understand," one woman said, "This week you tell us to put our full effort into perfectly cleaning the incense burners, but last week you told us this story about a student who thoroughly raked all the leaves in a courtyard, only to have the Zen master throw the leaves back on the ground and make him do it again.  The student raked the leaves perfectly, but was told that was too much effort.  How do we know when we're giving our full effort and when we're doing too much?"

I have a habit, born of years of training as a straight A student, of always trying to answer another student's question before the teacher does.  I give myself extra points if my answer (as scored by an independent panel of judges in my head) is better than the instructor's.  But in this case, all I could think was, "Good question!  Let's see you get out of that one, Bob!"

Bob paused and said, "You stop when it is no longer a gift.  In the story, when the master threw the leaves on the ground, it was because the student asked for the master's approval.  He wanted to be praised for what a good job he did.  So he did the work, not as a gift, but to gain something: to gain the master's approval.  When you seek to gain something, it is not a gift.  And when your work is not a gift, it's time to stop.  That is your full effort, even if the job is not done."

Oh.

Good answer.  Wish someone had told me that about 40 years ago.  Maybe I can learn to clean those incense burners better than I thought I could.

A big red C. There it was, heartbreakingly plastered on the front of the report I had worked for weeks on. I had painstakingly drawn a wombat on the special mottled pastel paper, neatly stenciled the title ("All About Wombats"), and enclosed it, along with the several pages of notebook paper that constituted my report on these marsupials (native to Australia!), in a plastic report cover. Under the C, in tidy teacher's handwriting, were the words: "I would have given this an A, if it were an individual project. I had to lower the grade because you did not work with the rest of your group."

I hadn't. It was true. The other two members of my group did their own report on wombats. I had stopped working with them at some point. I hated group projects. I wanted my group to like me, have fun and yet do things my way, perfectly, so the teacher would give us a good grade. In my secret heart, I knew the "right" way to go about things, but I couldn't boss them, or even imply that I knew anything, because then they wouldn't like me. But I also couldn't stand to see them going at it the "wrong" way. And I didn't want to jump in and help, because I'd end up doing all the work but not getting all the credit. (I mean, if the project succeeded due to my awesomeness, how terrible would it be for me not to get sole credit for it?)

Surprise, surprise! I just couldn't make all that work. My need for control conflicted with my need to people please. My need to please the teacher conflicted with my need to please my peers. My need for perfection conflicted with almost everything. So before my head exploded from the strain, I took the best way out I could see: I did my my own report, perfectly, and hoped the teacher wouldn't notice that whole "working with a group" piece. Of course, it was painfully obvious (and awkward) when my classmates shuffled nervously to the front of the class with me and we gave two separate reports. So, we each got credit for the work we did, not just on the project itself, but on our abysmal failure to work together to create one coherent project instead of two separate ones.

What I learned from that at the time was the very profound lesson: group project suck and I suck at them. From then on, I decided the best thing to do was to avoid group projects when possible. If that wasn't possible, I'd decide whether I'd be better served by silently submitting to the rest of the group or by cutting and running (and suffering the consequences).

Yesterday, I was confronted by a situation in which I may have to work with some neighbors (who totally don't do things right!) for the benefit of a child in our area. And I saw that throwing my hands up and saying "I suck at this!" or "I can't work with them if they're going to do things that way!" or "Fine, whatever, let them do a half-assed job!" is not what is going to benefit the child (although it does have the very real benefit of me not having to change). They want to help the child. I want to help the child. The child will be better served by all of us working together than by each of us stalking away to write our separate reports. So, it's time to use the tools at my disposal (including working the Steps around this) to make sure that this time, things aren't done perfectly or my way or in the way that makes people like me best, but together for the best result.

When I was a child, my mother used to drag me off to church every Sunday. Oh, how I hated it, and I told her so. "I hated going to church when I was little too," she told me, "But then, when I was older, things got hard, and I found comfort in those rituals from my childhood. One day, you are going to need God, and you will have this to come back to." When my life started to spin out of control five years ago -- when both autism and sex addiction simultaneously became part of the language of our household -- I knew she was at least partially right; I did need a higher power to lean on, but I was still too deeply bitter toward the religion of my youth to derive comfort from it. So, I did what any twenty-first century spiritual seeker would do: I googled "Buddhism" and found a meditation center within a somewhat reasonable driving distance.

I asked my husband to accompany me to a newcomers' meditation session, hoping both for support and to, er, "persuade" him to walk this particular spiritual path with me. I had never meditated or been to a Buddhist ceremony before before, and I listened nervously to the instructions, hoping to get everything just right and not appear to be what I actually was: clueless. I was unfamiliar with the practices and rituals; the very things my mother had hoped to provide for me. I wouldn't have to wander into a church and figure out what to do with the holy water or how to give the proper response to the priest's call, but here I was lost. And I didn't know how to be vulnerable without seeming weak, so when the instructor reassured us that it would be hard to sit still, I took it not as comfort and encouragement, but as a challenge. This at least I was going to get right. Other people might not be able to sit still, but I was going to be the best meditator ever. I was going to win the meditation medal. I was going to show them all who could sit still.

So I sat. For forty five minutes. And didn't move an inch except for the soft rise and fall of my breath. I could feel my legs aching and my feet falling asleep, but I didn't budge. I heard other people rustling around and laughed internally, because I was totally winning. A chime sounded, ending the meditation, and I felt disoriented but triumphant. I couldn't feel my feet at all. Everyone else was standing up, so I (being the gold medalist newcomer) tried to follow along dutifully, but my foot — cramped, bloodless and numb from sitting — couldn't bear the weight. I heard a loud pop as my ankle buckled and I collapsed on the floor in front of a room of silently stunned Buddhists, who very kindly gathered me up from the floor and told me they'd been there too once.

And the winner is? Not me. I hobbled out, leaning on my husband and shivering from shock and embarrassment. We went off to the closest emergency room to have my rapidly swelling ankle x-rayed and diagnosed as a bad sprain, but fortunately not a break.

The foot healed slowly, but my ego not so much; it was (thankfully) quite shaken. Since then, I have been keeping up a meditation practice in my own home, but I hadn't been back to the meditation center in years. There were lots of good reasons, of course. I have two young children, and it's hard to get away. But the main thing holding me back hasn't been my busy schedule, it has been fear. This is something new, something I don't know, something I have to learn from scratch. And there is nothing scarier for me than learning, than admitting I don't know, than being vulnerable.

I promised myself that I would finally go back. It has taken five years of recovery work to feel like I could even make that promise to myself and another two months to work up the courage to carry out that resolution once I had made it. This week, I went back at last. I was anxious every mile of road I drove and every step I walked to get in. I didn't chant the right words or bow at all the times I was supposed to. And as I sat in meditation, my chest tightened with fear when I felt my foot falling asleep. I didn't sit perfectly still. In fact, I didn't perfectly anything. But I showed up. And this time I was willing to admit that there was lots I didn't know and I was willing to admit there was lots I still thought I knew (but was probably wrong about). I followed the leads and accepted help of people who knew more than I did and hoped they didn't remember me as the chick who crashed and burned five years ago. And afterwards, I promised them, and myself, that I'd be back and try again.

Many years ago, I had an argument with my ex-boyfriend about grammar.

"You know, between you and I..." he said.

"You and me," I corrected.

He refused to believe me. So, we bandied about words like "preposition," "subject," and "object" before consulting Strunk and White. In the end, I was right (of course).

"Fine. Well, it just sounds better the way I say it," he said.

"It never sounds better to use improper grammar," I replied, which was an even more awful and snotty thing to say than it had been to correct him in the first place. And it's not even strictly true. English grammar is incredibly complicated and often arcane; it's all too easy to make mistakes, whether from confusion or ignorance or carelessness or just the need to pass for someone who is not an uptight grammar snob. And of course the English language isn't static, but alive and evolving; the rules change to keep pace with it, resulting in a constant tension between grammar conservatives and grammar progressives.

That complexity is the very reason that any professionally run organization or business will employ people to write and proofread their communications. The back of your cereal box alone has passed before the eyes of more people than most folks would ever imagine before it is ever printed.

In recent years, I've consciously loosened up on my grammar and stopped correcting other people (unless I'm paid to do it). For one thing, I've met people who are bigger grammar nerds than I am, who've corrected the minutiae of my speech and writing, and (between you and me) they're just unbearable to be around.* And then, about ten years ago, I was called out by another writer for being too uptight about prepositional phrases. She called me (I believe) "a fussy old man" and pulled out The Chicago Manual of Style to back her up. Slam!

However, I realized just yesterday, as I was checking my e-mail, how important grammar is for things other than making people feel bad and giving grammar nerds something to argue about. (See, how casual I was there about ending my sentence with a preposition? I'm totally over that fussy old man love affair with the prepositional phrase. Totally.) As elitist or boring or just plain snotty sounding as grammar may seem, it is still the key to the castle. A key that scam artists don't hold, but I do.

Yesterday, I received a message (supposedly from Google) stating that my Gmail account would be deleted unless I supplied them with certain personal information, such as my password and birth date. The message might have been alarming if it hadn't contained so many grammatical errors (in addition to its blatant request for information that Google shouldn't need to keep my account open). The errors showed me that the e-mail was not coming from a major US corporation, with their teams of professional writers; it was coming from one or two individuals with poor grammar and no proofreading help.

So, to all you kids out there, if you are considering a career as a professional con artist, remember to stay in school and pay attention in English class. One misplaced comma could mean the difference between buying your own private island and winding up on Riker's Island. And if you are aspiring to be an honest, hardworking citizen whose life savings will contribute to your own comfortable retirement, rather than that of a seasoned scam artist, please study your grammar. After all, even if it doesn't ever help you uncover a scam, it can still help you win arguments with your significant other, although you may sound a little unbearable doing it.

Mark and I took the kids to a local Easter egg hunt this weekend. All the children lined up, eagerly clutching baskets, their eyes wide with awe and anticipation. Hundreds of eggs winked brightly from the grass. The rules for the hunt were outlined.

As parents carved paths through the crowd to shove their eager children closer to the front, I recalled the true meaning and purpose of Easter egg hunts: to the most rapacious and aggressive go the spoils.

All my life I have been, or tried my damnedest to be, the kid with the most Easter eggs. And what that brought was an inability to listen to my own body and soul, and the desire for more and yet more brightly colored eggs in my basket. So it was that my children (I'm embarrassed to say) once had one of their I-won-No-I-won-No-I won fights interrupted by a screaming rant from me about how bad competition is and how I would not tolerate it in my house.

It became clear before the hunt started that my children were unlikely to come away with full baskets. It became still more clear as soon as the hunt began, when all rules were abandoned and chaos ensued, that my children were going to come away with entirely empty baskets. And that fiercely competitive child still inside me seethed. We walked through the roiling field together, all the grass picked clean of eggs by the time we reached it. Two empty baskets.

We walked off the field past a girl dressed in her Easter best, frilly white with lavender ribbons. She stood red faced, tears carving silent white tracks down her cheeks. Her basket held a single egg. Most of the children filed of the field in dejection, but a few sat on the grass surrounded by pastel bounty, counting their eggs.

"I'm sorry you guys didn't get any eggs," I said.

"Oh, well," said my son, "Can we go to the park now?"

Yes, yes, yes!