As long as I can remember I've been a perfectionist.

Perfectionism as far as I can tell is not my natural state. Some people are born with the insatiable need to set the world to order and make everything as symmetric as possible; one of my friends in high school would take an entire bag of skittles, pour it out, line the candies up by color, then eat the extras until each color had the same amount and then eat them, in order.

I'm more of the scorched earth kind of person myself. Hell, I'm a Sagitarrius and even if you don't buy into all of the astrology stuff being a fire sign suits me. I'm fickle, tend to burn too bright and too hot and then get too cold, and almost nothing I do has a clean edge. Perfect is not a word in my natural vocabulary.

But I am, nonetheless, a perfectionist.

So this weekend ended up being kind of a watershed moment for me. Chris and I got into an argument (all of our arguments start the same way btw, with my own insecurities) about why I had thus far been unable to accomplish as much in the household as we had both hoped. This is a recurring feature of our life together because, honestly, I suck at cleaning.

Actually, suck is too kind of a word. I half-heartedly attempt to clean, then wipe out all of my own progress, unconsciously.

I don't plan to make the mess worse than before, I just do.

This particular iteration of the "Chris brings it up, Mel feels awful, Mel strikes back, Chris gets upset" cycle happened while sitting in front of a local restaurant on Saturday. I don't know how we got there, but during this set Chris had his own major realization about why.

Why, in this case, turned out to be my complete lack of mental tools needed to get the job done. I have no critical thinking skills to speak of, no process planning skills, and no quality control skills. I know things go wrong, but I never do the necessary steps to determine the problem and fix the process. So each time something goes wrong, I feel utterly helpless and like an utter failure. Add in ADHD complete with its memory glitches and nothing ever gets better. It should be noted, this is a failure in the mental process far before where most organizational systems pick up so my years of trying to organize my life didn't do a damn thing.

Right now he's working on teaching me the necessary skills for process planning and analysis while adapting what he knows for use with my particular flavor of ADHD. We've started with the Deming Cycle (plan-do-study-act) and we're going from there.

That brings us to today. Chris is at work, I'm attempting to take care of the items on my to-do list (and failing horribly) but also adding in the Deming Cycle, specifically the part where I study. I study why things didn't go the way I'd planned and identify a possible solution.

So far today I'd managed to take two different problems and apply those steps. The first problem, losing 2 hours of time to a case of overfocus, I was unable to fix on the spot. However, I've come up with a plan to keep it from happening again. The second problem I managed to fix during the process. I left Walmart craving Taco Bell for lunch and, instead of just buy it, I identified why the craving existed and elected instead to stop at Safeway for a healthier lunchtime dose of crunchy/salty/creamy in the form of homemade tacos (much cheaper and satisfying long run).

That brought me to the afternoon and my review of my to-do list.

One item on my to-do list stuck out and haunted me. Call the bank and get the debit cards fixed.

See, when the IRS fucked up our accounts our debit cards for our household and Chris's personal accounts got canceled. I need to call and get new cards issued.

I don't want to do it. So I sat there trying to force myself to pick up the phone and call the number, all the while playing the theoretical conversation in my head.

"Sorry, I need new debit cards because the IRS seized our bank accounts and I couldn't fix it for months. Please send us new cards."

It stopped being "didn't want to call" and started being "terrified of calling."

This terror was the hangup in my PDSA cycle. I needed to study the problem and determine the best solution.

An hour later I'd managed to make my waterproof mascara run. I started bawling the moment I realized what I was feeling.

"The root of perfectionism is a sense of conditional acceptance."

Perfectionism, then, is a relational issue and not something that arises solely on its own or within a person. There are several environments in which perfectionism can arise, but they all share the sense that acceptance, or harmony, or safety within the family, are dependent on how a family member performs.

Freeing our families from perfectionism is less about finding the right thing to do, and more about creating an environment of acceptance. Of course, it is also important to challenge our children, and ourselves, to reevaluate our beliefs and change our behaviors. Its important to be clear that we love our children whatever they do or do not accomplish. They should know that mistakes are a part of everyone's life and that these mistakes can always form a basis for learning. All of the behavioral and cognitive interventions we can think of to help our children will become most useful in an environment in which their feeling of acceptance is secure. Absent this, explaining to a perfectionistic child that she needn't worry so much is simply heard as one more criticism.