Joy in the Imperfect

Sunday mornings are my favorite time of the week.  I look forward to them…drinking coffee, not having anywhere I feel I need to be, giving myself grace from any responsibilities and just ‘being’.  If fairy godmothers existed and one was granting me a wish, it would be that someone was sitting beside me on that quiet morning, drinking coffee and completely content to be “doing nothing” as long as we were doing it together.  If only I could find a magic wand.

Do you ever wake up and feel unsettled?  Not for any particular reason but there’s this stirring deep within that you can’t quite shake, can’t quite explain, yet you know that it’s likely the result of change.  For me it’s usually not a blatant change I can see, as in something exterior, situational or easily explained.  No it’s usually just another piece of something falling off of me…making me more vulnerable, more exposed and a little more aware of my theoretical surroundings. 

I will admit that perhaps I didn’t do myself any favors by watching “Under the Tuscan Sun” and “Eat, Pray, Love” today.  I had seen both of those movies before.  Why they happened to be on the same morning when I was already feeling unsettled may have been a blessing or a curse, hard to say.  I don’t remember much about seeing them the first time and I know they didn’t have much of an impact on me.  Of course I got the message that we should figure out who we are, follow our dreams and so on, but both main characters are recently divorced and I last viewed them through the lens of a married woman.   It was an entirely different 

experience today.

I remember about a month after my husband and I split up, I was at a restaurant with a friend and I smiled at something she said.  She looked at me strangely, not because my smile was misplaced in regards to her comment, but because I realized she probably hadn’t seen me smile quite like that before.  I said to her “I think I’ve forgotten how to smile!” I explained that while married I didn’t feel particularly happy except in regards to my kids, nor did I let myself know that I was terribly unhappy.  You see, I’m not an emotional person in the way so many women are and I envy that…I am more of an analyst…feelings have to make sense to me for me to understand what I feel.  So for me to admit to myself that I was unhappy and acknowledge that I hadn’t smiled in ages, meant that I had to come face to face with the reasons why.  I’m also a problem-solver so if I started making a long list of problems, it would require some action on my part.  In this particular case, many of the problems were not things I could fix myself so it was easier just to not smile and not frown but to just keep on making it ‘work’ and I use that term loosely.

Both of the heroines of the movies I watched today had one simple luxury that many divorced women do not have while trying to redefine their lives…they didn’t have children.  I’m not regretful that I have mine, but the world has handed single mothers a raw deal.   Society makes us feel that we have the weight of the world on our shoulders, need to devote all of our time to making sure our kids are not eternally damaged because we broke up the family.  Also, we become some terrible cliche and finding love again will not only be more difficult, it will need to be put on the back burner for an insufferable amount of time.  So for most newly divorced mothers trying to raise children with or without much help, generally living their lives by default rather than pure choice, having a hand in redesigning it seems like a very nice idea, but not something we should aspire to ourselves, that’s for the movies.

I purposely decided not to date at first, even though the attachment to my husband was long, long gone before he was, I just needed to feel I knew what I was doing moment to moment, day to day and week to week before I thought of much else.   There were many times, that given the particulars of my children, the limited involvement of my ex-husband and other factors that I felt it would be very hard to even get a man to consider me, so I hid out in the comfort of that thought for a good while. 

As you know, my introduction to dating (as told in “First date in 20 years”) happened somewhat by accident.  I remember when people saw me after I met the catalyst…they were visibly taken aback by my smile, my confidences, my new outlook on life.   Over time I realized that my kids are getting older, my oldest just has a few years left with me and when they are gone from the nest, I will have to have my own life.   It’s okay to sometimes choose myself over them.  It’s okay to tell them they can’t go xyz because I have plans, something I would have never done before.  It’s good for them to see me happy, to see me redefining who I am, to see me screw up, too. 

While I can’t traipse around the globe, or make all the changes I would make in an ideal situation, or even command love to come my way, I CAN make my own life in the midst of living it.  I can buy myself something nice just because I want it.  I can make mistakes in friendship, dating and money.  I can redefine my spirituality, always seeking to learn that which I do not know.  I can have my own version of finding myself, still being a mom and hopefully someday, find someone to love again in spite of me.  It’s okay to face my brokenness and my imperfection and not try to hide it away in another country like the heroines did.

As I was texting with someone this morning, talking about brokenness, I said “Maybe it’s only the broken who can give something to others.”  We look at the people who seem to have it all together, we say that is who we want to be like, be with and aspire to, but they’re not perfect.  In fact, they are likely more messed up than the rest of us, they’ve just learned to hide it so well from themselves that they don’t even know it.

I’ve always been more attracted to the broken, the messy, the flawed and the cracked things in life.  In fact, someone was once talking about me to a room full of people and said “Most people would not have attempted what you have taken on.”  In this particular context, he was talking about me embracing the imperfect that most people reject.  Perfection has always made me nervous.  Although I am one of the most open minded people around, the place I am most prejudiced is perfection.  Maybe that makes me a skeptic or a snob.  Perfection can never simply be that to me, because in its flawlessness it becomes undesirable to me.  Perhaps loving imperfection is where I am a risk-taker (which is not a phrase most would use to describe me.)  I’ve never had perfect, or ideal, or a large supply of sunshine.   I’m not comfortable there.  I’m more comfortable with sunshine after the rain, amidst cold or because it makes a rainbow.  I like the vulnerability of those broken places, so I embrace something breaking off of me today, perhaps some sunlight can come in, perhaps it withers, perhaps it makes me more beautiful.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all, and surely I’m not the only one who rejects perfection.

So today, even though there was no one sitting next to me drinking coffee like my heart desires, nor, do I feel more settled than I did when I woke up, it’s okay.   I can be content in my vulnerability, embrace my broken places, keep redesigning my life and find joy in the imperfect.