Dear Daughter,

You are five. And five is a tough age to be.

You haven’t yet mastered all of your motor skills and that makes it harder to wield the basic tools of Kindergarten, like pencils and scissors. You are frustrated and “your heart hurts,” because you can’t seem to master cutting out a piece of paper precisely how you envision.

Like me, you are a creator.

And like me, I see the seeds of perfectionism in you already. I am worried.

You created a masterpiece in class that you have now “ruined” by adding color to its eye. You are devastated.

You are crying while crumbling, tearing and tossing bits of paper. I am going about the work of a parent, cleaning up the kitchen and doing the dishes. Your distress hits my ears and then my heart. At first, I don’t understand why you are “overreacting” about a tiny piece of paper. But, on this day I have decided to take care of your heart instead of being frustrated by your crying. The fact that this is a rarity only proves that I am not perfect and I too am a work in progress.

I sit with you at the table and you ask for a hug. This is when you tell me that your heart hurts and I understand. It is frustrating when you cannot get the vision held so firmly in your mind’s eye to reveal itself in the physical world.

I am going through the exact same dilemma in my grownup world. I am trying to get a business off the ground and my blog up and running. I am having daily setbacks and get frustrated when my abilities don’t match up with my vision.

So I counsel you with the same words of advice my own hurting heart needs to hear…

We are not perfect. Sometimes we have to fail many, many times before we get it right. Each time you ‘mess up,’ you learn something new about how to do it better the next time. You need to keep trying even when you just want to crumble up the paper and go play with something else.”  

I remind you that just the night before I showed you how to manipulate some graphics on the computer for my website. I couldn’t quite get an element to position correctly so I had to make multiple attempts. It took me several times to get the graphic on the site exactly how I wanted it. In fact, you asked me why I kept doing the same thing so many times. I didn’t know then that you would need the same lesson just a day later.

We talk about how it was hard to learn how to draw hearts, but you eventually mastered it because you drew hearts. on. everything. everyday. for months.

We recall learning to walk and I show you videos of when you were a toddler. This alone cheers you up because you love seeing yourself as a baby. In the videos, you fall and get up, fall and get up, fall and get up, but eventually, you learned to walk. This might be too high brow for you at age five, but I hope your subconscious is picking up on my words.

I hope that buried deep inside your spirit you will know that it is ok for your heart to hurt when you can’t get something right the first, second, third…fiftieth time, but that you get back up and try one more time. This is a lesson I am still learning, but I want better for you.

I love you the mostest, mostest, mostest in the whole wide world…galaxy…universe.

Mom