So, have your read the recent New York Times article on toddlers and iPhones? It's shocking and alarming! More and more parents (oh, ok, moms -- only one nameless man is mentioned in the entire article and we are not told how he handles his toddler's request) are giving their badly behaved children iPhones in order to shut them up! It's the 21st century version of plopping them in front of a TV! Only worse! Because it's interactive and kids like it better! It's damaging their developing brains! And deluded parents moms (colluding with evil marketers) pacify themselves by imagining some of this is educational for their children!

So, having kept on top of articles criticizing mothers for not being perfect and blaming them for everything that's wrong in the world the latest in parenting news, let me parse this for you:

• Letting your child ever, for one second of her life, touch an iPhone = bad parenting. You let your child touch an iPhone? Congratulations! You just caused brain damage. Your child will grow up to be a friendless alcoholic who is a drain on society. The collapse of Western civilization is entirely your fault, Mom.
• Having a child who is unable to remain motionless and quiet at all times in public without an iPhone = bad parenting. See above re: friendless alcoholic and it all being your fault.
• Wanting 10 minutes of quiet time, free from your child's demands = bad parenting. You must not really love your child if you are not constantly enraptured by them. Plus you clearly don't know how to set limits. Oh, and you're taking the easy way out. There's so much wrong with you, I don't even know what to say, other than: friendless alcoholic!
• Focusing your constant, developmentally enriching attention on your child for every single waking instant of your damn life, so that your child behaves to everyone's satisfaction without a minute of boredom and without ever touching an iPhone = bad parenting. Actually, the worst parenting. Helicopter parenting! (I wish I had a really spooky font for "helicopter," but that's okay, you can just read it in a spooky voice to yourself.) Your child will not only end up a friendless alcoholic, but he will have been so coddled he will be unable to dress himself, leading to an arrest for indecent exposure. Just you wait!
• "Free-ranging" your child so that they learn to entertain themselves without an iPhone = bad parenting. They will just steal someone else's iPhone while you are irresponsibly shirking your duty to watch them every moment (but the right way, you know, not by being a "helicopter parent"). Still, you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that your child will not become a friendless alcoholic. But that's only because she won't live long enough. She will be abducted and murdered by a stranger or will drown in a puddle or will fall and break her neck. And you will deserve it. Don't expect any sympathy. You got what was coming to you, bad Mom. And we are all better off without the worthless criminal your child was sure to become.
• Using your own best judgment about the use of various tools and techniques in moderation = bad parenting. Stop being lazy and making excuses for giving your child brain damage by handing him that iPhone for a 15 minute car ride! There is a right and a wrong way to do things. And anything less than 100% perfectly right all the time will lead to friendless alcoholic, drain on society, end of Western civilization, etc.

So, how can you be a good parent? It seems hopeless. Fortunately, there are two options:

1. Provide your child with wooden toys. (And make sure there's no lead paint on those! Oh, and don't be too uptight about it, because nobody likes a killjoy). Also, provide developmentally appropriate books. (And do start with picture books. After all, you did read that article about how bad parents moms are pushing their kids into chapter books too fast, right?) Nothing with batteries, nothing with screens, no BPA plastic, no potentially toxic anything, no choking or strangulation hazards. But do that all effortlessly, because if you suck all the fun out of childhood, you are also a bad mom.
   
   Next, focus your complete, perfect, developmentally enriching attention on your children for some unknown ideal number of hours each day. Too much or too little and we are right back to friendless alcoholic. If you don't already know that perfect number, I'm not going to tell you; all good parents already know it. If you don't, you were clearly raised by wolves yourself, so there's no point. You're beyond hope, and so is your child. You'll have to skip to Option 2.
   
   Now (and this is the most important part) have a child who behaves perfectly at all times and entertains herself on cue in quiet and educationally appropriate ways whenever your perfect, developmentally enriching attention is not on her, and who voluntarily (but politely and without seeming uptight or brainwashed) refuses offers of other kids' inappropriate toys and effortlessly redirects them into fun, educational, developmentally appropriate play. If that sounds tough, it is. Fortunately, there's an easier way. Which brings me to...
2. Be a man. When fathers hand their kids iPhones, it's cute, because those silly men don't know any better. And besides, he's trying to train Junior to be an engineer! When fathers refuse iPhones and the kids throw a tantrum in public, Dad is being a tough disciplinarian who is raising an upstanding citizen.
   
   Be a man and no one will mention you by name in a New York Times article full of dataless speculation about things that might, maybe, in some unknown quantities be harmful to children (or not, but of course they are, we all know that). No one will criticize your sad inability to breastfeed. No one will picture your fatherly face when they read about a 12-year-old who can't operate an ice tray because his "helicopter parents" (read: mom) spent too much time with him, gave him too much attention or was too helpful. No one will imply that you are heartlessly shirking your duties or that you don't love your child adequately if you drop him off at daycare.
   
   Now, I know what those of you born with vaginas are thinking, "But I can't just become a man!" To which I say, sure you can. Halloween is just around the corner and I bet all those fake beards will be on sale soon. And let's face it, even sex reassignment surgery and a lifetime of testosterone supplements would be a hell of a lot easier than Option 1. Or you could, oh I don't know, use your own best judgment and trust other people to do the same. Oh, right! That would be bad parenting.

The school secretary looked at me over the top of her glasses. The look clearly said, "Oh. It's you again. The mom who can't be bothered to get her child to school on time." She knows my daughter and me, which is not a good thing in a large school like my daughter's where I am definitely not on the PTA. She knows me because, I'm the Chevy Chase of moms. Seriously, if I were a mom in a movie, Chevy Chase would play the role of me.

I used to have a different relationship with school secretaries, and a part of me wishes I were wearing a big flashing shirt with a picture of my college diploma on it. It would be my way of saying, "I know! I'm disorganized! But I graduated at the top of my class and went to a really fancy college. I'm super good at all school stuff, except the getting here on time part. Seriously, give me an essay to write on the use of theatrical metaphors in Shakespeare and I am so on it. I can even get an A+ in gym and wood shop, as long as a significant portion of the grade is based on written tests about theory. You would like me if I were a student here. You'd never have a single disciplinary problem with me, and I'd skew the standardized test scores up to make the school look fancy. It's just as a parent that I seem kind of sucky."

School secretaries used to like me, even though they had to write late slips. And I'm an obsessive record keeper, so I know the had to write lots of them. Over the years, my diary entries read something like this:

"Missed the bus. Late for school."
"Missed the bus again."
"Late for school again."
"Walked to school because I missed the bus."
"Got to school on time! But forgot to brush my hair and put on makeup. "

Still the school secretaries would smile and ask if I wanted to pick up my trophy/certificate/medal/savings bond/scholarship check while I was there. It was like being a student athlete, only without the being-good-at-sports part.

And today, I had really genuinely meant to be on time. It was school picture day, so I knew I was going to have to be on my game. My daughter wanted to wear her fanciest dress and have me do her hair in its fanciest style: pigtails. So, she was up on time, eating breakfast and I was focused. No TV this morning. No playing Beatles Rock Band. I combed her hair into two neat pigtails and we put on her favorite dress. Then she grabbed her baseball cap.

"I think that's going to mess up your hair for the picture," I said.

"No it's not," she said, and placed it lightly on top of her head, so that if she leaned forward, it would fall off. She removed it and said, "See?"

"Oh no!" I cried in mock horror. "The hair! It's crazy!" And I laughed, but Janie covered her face with her hat and started to cry, "No, it's not!"

"No, it's not. I was teasing."

"That's not nice."

"I'm sorry. I love you. And it doesn't matter how your hair looks anyway. You're awesome. Let's go."

So Janie mashed the hat down on her head for real, smooshing down the carefully placed pigtails and walked out the door, head down, still mad at me. As we approached the school, I checked her backpack and... Oh crap. There was the picture order form (not filled out) and the envelope for the money (with no money).

"Uh oh. I didn't fill this out or pay the money," I said.

"Oh no!" said Janie, "But Mama, I got dressed in my fancy dress and everything, and now I won't get my school picture taken!" Her lip started to do that quivery thing. Crap. The form says right there on it "No late payments will be accepted."

"It's ok. I can do it right now." So I find a bench outside the school and start pulling out the entire contents of my purse. I definitely have some kind of writing implement in here somewhere. Mini-golf pencil! Score! I fill out the form. Now for the payment. I'll just whip out my checkbook and... Out of checks. Damn. Ok, I'll dig around in my purse for money. Is there a voice coming out of my cell phone? Crap. I accidentally called someone. Ok. Deal with that later. I definitely don't have enough bills, but I do have a lot of change. In fact, five dollars of it: nickels and dimes and quarters, which I stuff into the envelope, which now weighs twenty pounds. This is when my disorganization pays. Literally.

Janie is wide-eyed with delight at watching me count so much change, and clearly relieved that I have saved the day by having barely enough money in my purse for the minimum picture package. "We're going to be late," I said, "I'm really sorry."

"It's ok, Mama," said Janie, and together we walked into the office.

"Reason for lateness?" the school secretary said.

"It's totally my fault," I said. Janie looked up at me and smiled.

"Mom late," she wrote on the late slip, frowning. She handed the slip to Janie, and I watched her bounce off to her classroom, her hat still smashed down over her pigtails, thinking it's not bad to be the Chevy Chase of moms, but I still do want that flashing shirt, just a little.

A Facebook friend challenged me to go vegan for Earth Day, and I decided that, since I'm already vegetarian (I eat eggs and dairy but no meat or fish), it wouldn't be much of a stretch for me to stay away from all animal products for the day.  It will be good for the Earth, and besides my doctor told me just yesterday that a lower fat, lower cholesterol diet couldn't hurt.

So I got up on this fine Earth Day, threw some clothes on and got my kids off to school.  As I was walking back inside, thinking with satisfaction about the nice vegan breakfast I had planned for myself, I looked down and realized that I had been thinking of going vegan strictly as making a dietary change and had forgotten that veganism encompasses all use of animal products, including those in clothing.  Here I was going vegan wearing very non-vegan leather shoes.  Hm.  And my other pair of shoes?  Also leather.  That's the entirety of my shoe collection: all leather.  I'm just not a big shoe person.  But that's ok, because my jacket, purse and clothes are all still plant based, right?  Oh.  Turns out I'm wearing wool.  Which is also not vegan.  On the other hand, the polyester I'm wearing is vegan, but still not a sustainable, Earth friendly fabric.

Ok, this is going to be harder than I thought.  So, forget the clothes.  I will not go vegan on the clothes.  I'll just stick to eating vegan.

So, I pop my wheat bread in the toaster and prepare to top it with my usual Nutella, only...  Noooo!  Nutella is not vegan.  It contains milk.  I have to go all day without Nutella?!  Seriously?  Fine, fine.  Peanut butter is vegan and so is jelly.  And while that begs for a cool glass of milk, I can go with a very vegan glass of ice water for today.  Whew!  So, I had a nice vegan breakfast of PB&J on wheat toast.  Only as I rethought things on the energy of a full stomach, I realized the bread has yeast and honey, which if you are going to be hardcore about it, are also not vegan.  Damn.  I have now failed breakfast and getting dressed.

Ok, fine.  Progress, not perfection.  I will not go hardcore vegan.  I will just do food, but I will only cut out eggs and dairy, not yeast and honey.  Ha!  By those standards, I am now passing with flying colors and the rest of today should be no problem.  As long as I can stay out of the Nutella.

Thank goodness Coke is vegan or I'd never make it through the rest of the day!  Oh, and if it's not, please, don't tell me.  I don't love the Earth that much.

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.

I sort of want to write a post today, but I sort of want to curl up under a blanket and watch the leaves fall more. Of course, I say that, all romantic, with this great image of myself curled up with a cup of tea and a cat on my lap, but have you seen my house today? No. Thank goodness, none of you have. Nor have you smelled it.

Do you have kids? Do you know what a house looks like when they've been home for the weekend, generating dirty lunch dishes and taking stuff out of the Goodwill box to play with and leaving army men on the floor for people to step on? (Note to self: e-mail son's teacher to ask if he's limping.) A better mother and woman than I would put the kids and the husband to work cleaning up their own messes, but let's not get into that. Really, let's not. Well, ok, let's, but only if I don't have to hear about how you'd do it better.

In this house, your mother does live here and she's way more worried about contracting salmonella and falling to her death tripping over Legos than you are. So, yes, I could employ "natural consequences," leaving the dishes for someone else to do, until they reach up — in a stinking, fetid pile — to the ceiling, but then I have to live with a mountain of putrid dishes (and with the years of therapy it will take to bring me out of a state of catatonia when I find them covered with roaches) while my family cleverly fills the kitchen with discarded paper plates instead. (And yes, my husband has actually gone out to the store and purchased paper plates. You think I haven't tried?)

I could employ those old mothering standbys of nagging and punishing, rounding up family members and standing over them, poking them with the underwire of the bra that's currently on the kitchen floor until the dishes are done. (How did a bra get on the kitchen floor? Excellent question. It is mine and believe me I wasn't doing anything sexy in the kitchen with it. Somehow the dirty laundry migrated there this weekend. Yes, it really did. I don't know.)

I could ask for help, appeal to my family's better nature, institute a sticker chart or any number of other things (and don't think I haven't from time to time), but you want to know the truth? All of those things — the consequences, the nagging, the poking with bra underwire, the yelling, the endless sticker charts — take way too much energy. There are three people in the house who are happy to live in squalor and one who can't rest easy looking past the ping pong paddles on the sofa and the carrots and ranch dressing still on the table from last night's snack, who can't bring herself to kick the sleeping cat off the quilt that's currently on the floor and who can't quite enjoy drinking tea from a paper cup while looking at the leaves.

So that one person either needs to learn to look past the mess (and buy a noseclip to block out the smell of, whatever that smell is...) or she needs to get up and do the damn dishes. If I'm lucky, I can finish it all 5 minutes before my daughter comes home from school. And I did manage to get a blog post out of it. Thank goodness the glow of this computer screen blocks out that... Um, ew... Did someone actually leave a snotty tissue in the middle of the living room floor? I have to go clean that up.

I'm a party pooper.  I'm a downer.  I'm no fun.  I ruin other people's good times.  (Because I totally have control over other people's good times, you know.)

You see, yesterday Mark and I had plans to take the kids to a pumpkin patch.  We were going to let them run around and jump off hay bales and find pumpkins and navigate a kiddie corn maze.  But I woke up a few hours into my night's sleep when one wet child tried to climb in bed with me and an hour later when another child sniffling from the tail end of a cold woke up early and was ready to start the day.  And, as people who don't get enough sleep will be, I was cranky.  Bite your head off cranky.  Stab you in the eyeballs with a fork cranky.  Blast your eardrums straight out the top of your skull with my screams cranky.  That is, if I could open my bleary eyes long enough to find you.

I decided that I needed to go back to bed.  And that was a good decision.  But there was that whole pumpkin patch thing.  Now, the kids didn't know we were planning it, because I'm no fool or at least not so much of one as I used to be.  I know that my kids get so hyped up about exciting events that they can't sleep.  (Not that they slept anyway on this occasion.)  And then they become sorely disappointed (read: wail all day as if the world has ended) if someone gets sick or it rains or the car blows a tire and we can't go.  So I rarely tell them what we're up to until we're up to it.

I knew that they were none the wiser, but it still triggered that whole party pooper speech in my head.  That whole "I should work harder and do better" speech.  That whole "Why is it that everyone else in the world seems to be able to juggle jobs and sleep and housecleaning and taking their kids out to one freaking pumpkin patch once a year and I can't?!" speech.

I knew those speeches were coming from a place of exhaustion, but they were still pretty persuasive.  (You do have a point there, crazy voice in my head, I can be pretty sucky.)  But I went off to bed anyway.  And hours later, when I woke up, all the crazy talk was gone.  I took my son out to a park while my daughter went to a friend's house to play and Mark took a nap of his own, and suddenly I felt like the most together Mama ever.  Amazing what a little sleep will do to turn the party pooper into the life of of her own party.

I woke up this morning, muscles clenched like a fist and throat tight with anxiety, wanting to grab my son and never let him go. I crept to where he was sleeping and ran my fingers through his curls, reassuring myself he was there and safe. He'd actually been better than usual in this morning's version of my recurring nightmare; at least in this dream, I'd found him in the end.

I've had some variation on this nightmare — in which I lose one or both of my children — countless times. In a nightmare theme a few weeks ago, I'd happily, if absent-mindedly, voiced my assent to my 6-year-old daughter's trip to the mall with a friend of hers on Christmas day. Dream-hours later, when she wasn't home yet, I realized I didn't know the friend's name, address or phone number and there were no stores open on Christmas. She was gone, taken, and it was my fault.

Last night, my husband was the bad guy for a change instead of the usual villain: me. In my dream, he'd planned to go out to run some errands alone, but Austen begged to come, so the two of them went off together, but only Mark returned home, having forgotten he'd brought Austen with him. We rushed back to find him, with my dream mind running through the very real-life possibilities that Austen would not be able to communicate his needs and get help. We found Austen and he burst into tears mingled with a steady stream of anxious, repetitive shouts and questions with no answers, very much like what I'd expect of the real Austen under stress. Then the chime of my alarm woke me, still tight and panicky, and truly wanting to punch my husband, who was sleeping innocently beside me, totally unaware of what he'd been doing in my dream.

I realized, as time passed and I calmed down, that on top of the fear that I will lose my children, the sheer panic that they could be hurt or lost or worse — a fear any parent understands — there extends through all of these nightmares a different kind of fear. In each dream, at some point, I always think, "Oh, no. I'm not going to be able to find this child by myself. I have to ask someone — the store clerk, a police officer, a neighbor — for help. But if I tell them I lost my child, they are not going to want to help me. They are going to blame and judge me. They are going to tell me I didn't work hard enough and do well enough. They are going to tell me that it's my fault. And even if we find my child, they are going to think that my husband and I are such bad parents that they take our children away forever anyway." It's not just the realization that my child is missing that causes the nightmares to be so traumatic, it's the realization that my child is missing, that I might be blamed and that the problem is so big, I can't fix it by myself.

And I recognize that isolation and loneliness, that self—blame and guilt. I recognize those fears: The fear of asking for help. The fear that mistakes or weaknesses or imperfections will cause me to lose everything I love. The fear that I'm not working hard enough. The fear of judgment and of blame, and not just in and of themselves, but as agents of loss. I recognize in all of these the deep roots of addiction and codependency still present in my mind, gripping me when I sleep.

I used to love to watch The Odd Couple on TV growing up. I always hated Felix, so prissy and uptight, but I loved Oscar, unable to find his bed under piles of clothes and bits of old sandwiches. That, I thought, is me. And it's been true.

Mark and I had a friend come to visit once at an especially crazy point in our lives; Mark was finishing school and looking for a job while we simultaneously searched for a new apartment. We came home after an afternoon out apartment hunting to find that our friend (much to both our chagrin and delight) had done the dishes and made dinner. She asked how our day had been and we said it had been largely unsuccessful, as several of the places we saw did not come with dishwashers, and that was one of our primary requirements. Our friend wrinkled her nose and said, "It should be." Our dishes had been on the verge of growing enough life on them to become sentient and walk away.

After that, I did get a bit more fussy about cleaning before we had guests over. And I always inwardly roll my eyes when people who have never seen my house tell me not to fuss about cleaning so much. "People who love you won't mind if the house isn't perfect!" They say that, blissfully unaware that my aspirations have not generally been in the realm of a pearl-clad, white-gloved June Cleaver but more like "no overwhelmingly noxious odors."

Still, far from being ashamed of my slovenly ways, I've always had a deep pride in them. I was tickled that my kids had to learn from a book what an iron looks like and what it does or what a mop is for. "I'm no prissy, uptight Felix Unger," my home says to the world, "I'm casual and lovable Oscar Madison. And I have more time for fun since I'm not fiddling with all that silly cleaning."

Still since I've had kids, I have to admit, overall it's been less fun to be a slob than it used to be. I started worrying about what was around that they might shove in their mouths as babies. I started losing things and spending hours searching for them in piles of junk. I started impaling my feet on toys. And I started cleaning up my act, just a little: trying to have places for things rather than throwing them wherever they might land, doing the dishes at least every other day, occasionally sorting the laundry rather than dumping whites and colors all in together.

Yet I found myself taking offense the other day when I told a friend I needed to cut our chat short so that I could clean up the house in preparation for a guest and she told me not to sweat the cleaning stuff so much. I wanted to scream "I'm a slob! I have dead ants on my kitchen wall that are a year old! I am not some uptight, controlling perfectionist!" And that's when it hit me. This whole slob thing isn't about what I am, it's about manipulating other people's perceptions of me.

Being a slob, like its evil twin of being fastidious, is an extreme. I didn't want to be perceived as one extreme, so I swung to the other. And it's not serving my needs anymore. I don't like not being able to find things. I don't like smelly dishes. I don't like once white shirts that look rumpled and pinkish grey. I don't like looking at dead ants on my wall. But there's one thing I do like about being a slob, one thing that has always served me, the reason I still cling to my squalor: it allows me to say what I'm not. It lets me hold up my moldy dishes as proof that I am not an uptight, controlling, perfectionist codependent.

Guess what? I am an uptight, controlling, perfectionist codependent. And it's time to recognize that and work on balance rather than continue to leave unwanted crumbs on the floor to refute it.

A few years ago, I was visiting my friend Ellie and was a guest in her house for the first time in my life.  I had just taken a shower and was standing in her bathroom, a wet towel in my hand, at a loss for what to do.  Should I hang the towel on the rack?  Sling it over the shower?  Hang it on the bar inside the shower door?  And should I fold it in half or lay it out flat?  Maybe I should fold it in thirds?  Should I throw it in the laundry room?  Or maybe there was some other way of handling towels that I wasn't even aware of...  These seem like small things, but they deeply concerned me.  What was the right way to take care of a wet towel?

Oh, sure.  I knew what I would do at home.  But I also eat in front of the TV, chewing with my mouth open and resting my bare feet on the coffee table, at home.  And that, my friends, is certainly not the "right" way to eat.  I was pretty sure that there was a way to hang the towel that would signal that I was raised by wolves and would bring shame to my entire family.  My parents would be greatly disappointed in me, knowing they had told me a million times how to hang a towel, and now, at this critical moment, I had completely forgotten all they taught me about how people ought to do things.

I was going to be judged and found wanting.  I was going to be unmasked for what I was: crude and thoughtless.  Ellie was going to walk into that bathroom, see that towel hung up in some clearly, horribly, offensively wrong manner and was going to think I didn't love her enough to take care of her towels properly.  I'd never be invited back.  Our friendship would grow distant.  All over this towel!  And even if — through a sheer luck, — I passed this towel test, I was probably going to use the wrong fork at dinner.  Or put my elbows on the table.  Or forget to make my bed in the morning (I don't make mine daily at home).  Or make the bed the wrong way.  Or put my foot square in my mouth over something.

There went my brain, dashing off down those rutted, well worn tracks.  I'd seen people in my life cut down and cut out for things like the way they hang their wet towels, and I'd been cut down and cut out for similar things enough in past relationships that such questions and worries had become a matter of habit.  Somewhere along the line, I'd gotten it into my head that there was a right way to do everything, and everything must be done that way, perfectly.  If not, what followed was judgment, shame, humiliation, rejection and abandonment.  Those thoughts were so routine, I never even noticed them.  But this time, standing there in Ellie's bathroom, with a little bit of recovery behind me, I finally caught myself on that race to Crazytown and laughed out loud.  For crying out loud, it's a wet towel!  And everything is going to be ok, no matter how I hang it up.

So, I hung up the towel, left the bathroom and joined Ellie for breakfast.

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.