Tales from a Recovering Perfectionist

"He's perfect!" pronounced the pediatrician.  Fresh from his first examination, our first-born squirmed a little in his isolette as the doctor snuggled him back into the hospital's stiff flannel blanket.  Perfect.  10 fingers, 10 toes, his momma's lips and daddy's hairline.  A sense of reassurance washed over my swirling new-mother anxiety and hormones.  He's perfect.

"His respiration rate is still high.  We need to get that under control.  I would like to increase the C-PAP pressure to 60 and give him some phenobarbital to help him relax.  He's a sick little boy."  This was not how things were supposed to turn out.  I was not supposed to have a November baby.  My due date was still 4 weeks away.  My toddler, as a newly-minted big brother, was supposed to bring flowers to my hospital bed and seranade the new baby with the lullaby we'd practiced.  Instead, our baby was attached to monitors, an IV pumping drugs through his fragile veins, a tube down his throat delivering whatever I could pump.  No pronouncements of perfection.  In an act that almost felt like defiance, I penned a message on the whiteboard on his NICU wall: "We praise you for Connor is wonderfully made."  I wanted everyone to know--and needed the reminder, myself--that this baby was God's handiwork.  God knit him together in my womb.  God made him, and he was wonderful.

And he is wonderful.  And healthy.  And funny.  And naughty.  And all the things that God made him to be.  There's actually no reassurance in perfection, because it's not realistic.  God didn't create us to be perfect.  God's love formed us from the start and continues to hold us and shape us, while God's abundant grace smoothes over all our rough edges.  And isn't that wonderful?