Nobody's Perfect - by Darylynn Starr Rank
May, 2006

“Nobody’s Perfect”. I’ve placed it in quotes because it’s the name of a free program for parents of children under five run by Family Services. They have a variety of parenting workshops throughout the Lower Mainland, but the name of this one is what caught my eye, or captured my imagination. 

It immediately reminded me of an experience a friend of mine had. When she was telling me about it, she introduced it as the worst example of her parenting skills, ever, and she was crying as she said it.

I have to admit, I felt my body tense up, nervous about what she would say. A story about hurting children is not a wonderful thing to think about on a sunny Saturday afternoon. But that’s not what it turned out to be.

Her husband had moved north about two months before to start a new job and buy a new place for the family. He’d had no choice – the job started when it started.  So my friend, let’s call her Linda, was left to take care of their two sons, two and seven years old, pack up their belongings, and sell their house.

It was seven o’clock, a bad choice Linda declared, since it was bath and bedtime for the kids, but the only time the realtor could come to finalize the sale of their home. The place was a wreck, half packed up, half strewn with boxes and toys. 

Linda was in the living room trying to sign all the realty documents. The seven year old was busily wrapping string around his legs and doing silly dancing. The two year old really wanted a book that was on top of the dresser in the bedroom.

Crash. A really loud crash. Then crying and screaming.

Linda rushed to the bedroom to find her two year old invisible, hidden and wailing under the dresser that had fallen on top of him when he’d started climbing it to get the book. 

She couldn’t lift the dresser, couldn’t see her son, and had to desperately contort herself to reach under the drawers to pull him out. The seven year old became tangled in his silly dancing string and couldn’t get out of her way. So she started yelling in fear and frustration. 

Finally she retrieved the two year old, sobbing but unscathed, and the two of them huddled on the floor, rocking and crying, quickly joined by the seven year old.  Finally, leaping up to attend to the realtor downstairs, Linda became tangled in something and crashed back to the floor. She discovered it was the rope to her son’s favourite butterfly kite that he’d been forbidden to play with since it was already packed up. 

It was just too much. Linda snapped. Which is exactly what she did to the kite—snapped it right in half and threw it down at her seven year old’s feet. 

She wasn’t sure who started sobbing first, but the three of them ended up back on the floor crying wildly, each of them apologizing to the other! 

Then they sat and rocked and cried and cuddled until everybody had quieted down. 

That night while the boys slept, Linda tacked the butterfly kite up on his bulletin board, making it look as whole and undamaged as she could. Then she wrote apologies on the rest of the board along with a list of ten of the most wonderful things about him. (Some of them silly, she insisted, because she knew otherwise he’d be embarrassed and put off.)

It’s true. Nobody’s perfect, especially parents of young children. Older ones, too, for that matter. The stress has to take over some of the time. But what a response to having screwed up, eh? Crying, apologizing, explaining, cuddling, and then the bulletin board. 

Such a healing response to not being perfect is as good as it gets, I think.

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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