Confession Remorse

I found myself doing something odd this weekend. I was a flurry of activity among the plantlife that I try to call a 'garden'. You know from my past admission, that I don't even pretend to be a gardener, so it was a bit unusual that I was so committed to putting flowers in, pulling more weeds out and generally prettying up the outside of my house. I do love to have the flower beds blooming, but I don't enjoy getting them that way; so my persistence was a bit unnerving. I got really creeped out when I went to the garage for the third time and attempted to start the weedeater while Hero Guy was saving people from barfing up a lung while getting their thrills at The fair.


I began to assess this sudden addiction to this frustrating task that will need to be fiddled with every day in the coming weeks and won't ever be fully completed until summer ends when the cold weather kills everything. It suddenly dawned upon me....I had admitted to myself and to the blogsphere that I am actually not very good at something. Now I have to prove to everyone that I can, in fact, perform well in spite of myself. Hmmm, I wonder if this is a first-born child, perfectionist-type of thing or is it perhaps a girl thing? Could it be a mom thing or just a personality-type thing? This drive to prove that I indeed have no shortcomings, that I can actually be perfect if I put my mind to it--it's just baffling, and exhausting to be sure.

I followed up with the questions - Why in the world do I care if somebody knows I'm not the world's greatest gardener; or housecleaner; or athlete; or mother; or Christian; or - on and on it goes. Why do I care myself? What change of character actually takes place if I admit those things? What will cleaning up the yard, or the house, or my act temporarily, actually do to make me a better person?

It made me remember a study that was shown on 60 Minutes that said the greatest weight loss success will be achieved when you have admitted to the public that you are on a weight-loss program. The threat of humiliation spurs us into action even if temporarily, and we will generally do whatever we have to in order to acheive the results we are looking for just to avoid the humiliation of failure. I also read similiar research in Dr. Levine's book, A Mind at a Time which deals with learning disabilities. His work with children proved that a child would rather not attempt something at all than to try and fail if the failure will lead to some sort of embarrassment.

My conclusion, once my yard was glowing with flowers, was that I, in fact, am at the core of myself, still childlike in some ways, especially when it comes to needing the approval of others. I suppose we are all like that to some extent, but I also realized something else. It was very handy to have a subliminal motivator to get something done that had been bugging me for the last few weeks. So tune in soon for more confessions--While you're reading, I'll be in a frenzy becoming a neat-freak, a health nut and just perfection in general.