You don't have to be perfect Mommy!
Recently I attended an event that allowed ALL of my Littles to be in attendance.
It isn’t often with our schedules that without some SERIOUS pre-planning my College Aged daughter gets to grace us with her beautiful presence.
So you can imagine my excitement and just how much my heart began to flow the minute all of our skates took to the ice on Open Skate that afternoon.
It didn’t take me long to realize that my 18 year old gorgeous souled Little Girl wasn’t so little anymore.
I half smiled as I skated around that rink with her little 5 year old brother who was about as graceful on skates as a brand new fawn on its new legs.
He and I rounded the end of the rink to find my Meeshka’ in the same boat as her little brother.
I immediately laughed out loud at the sight of her trying to skate in FIGURE SKATES.
It wasn’t her thing, I knew it, but convincing her of that didn’t quite happen until the toe pick caught for the 100th time and made her mad enough to leave the ice to get Hockey Skates.
It was also in that moment that Morgan wanted to take a break.
So I skated him over to the benches where many a hockey player had sat for games, made sure he was ok with me skating for a minute by myself, closed the door & pushed off.
I got lost in the music and my own memories as my blades gracefully pushed across that ice.
I was instantly taken back to a time LONG before that moment that made me smile ear to ear.
It was 14 years prior.
A different time.
A different rink.
The circumstances were the same – It was open skate day & other than pond skating in my winter boots, which honestly doesn’t even compare, I had never set foot on ice in a pair of skates.
I was determined though, I had a Baby Girl that was the ripe age of 4 ½ and 16 days old.
Yes, 4 ½ and 16 days old.
It was HER thing back then, she counted days after her birthday until she was tired of counting and started learning words from the Dictionary instead.
Regardless, I was determined, so I laced up my hockey skates and ventured on the ice.
To say that I went down the second my second skate hit the ice would be an understatement.
I wasn’t just mortified that I had fallen, I was HURTING everywhere, and to make matters worse, well I couldn’t get UP!
Not because I didn’t want to or because anything was broken, but because I DIDN’T know how to without making matters worse.
Out of no where slides in this tiny little Peanut with her hockey jersey on, hair coming out of her helmet, as she skids across in front of me and says, “Mommy are you ok? That kind of looked like it hurt.”
“Yeah Meesh I am ok. Just trying to figure out how to get up,” I said back to her.
She replied with, “You just HAVE to do it Mommy. You just have to push off the ice, get on your knees, and GET UP! It’s easy, watch me,” she replied with a BIG smile behind the cage on her hockey helmet.
She wasn’t kidding either. She pushed off the ice, rolled up onto her knees and in an instant was on her feet on skates.
I want to tell you that I was that graceful, I wasn’t.
It took a few goes, and a couple passerby’s stopping to help, but I eventually got up right.
Skating after that wasn’t graceful. I won’t even pretend that it was.
I was scooting around the ice with short little strokes of my skates that made it down right comical to anyone watching me.
I could not skate.
I didn’t know the first thing about it, but that didn’t stop my little girl from skating back around to me to try to tell me how.
She skated past me and then turned sideways to show me she could stop while pushing a spray of ice with her.
She giggled while she yelled out, “You don’t have to be perfect Mommy, you just have to TRY!”
It didn’t take long for me to gather myself and my pride.
I didn’t just owe this to her to try, I owed it to MYSELF!
I finally LET GO of the wall and pushed off.
I looked like a crazy person no doubt.
“Scoot, Scoot, Oh! Slow! Slow! Don’t fall Beckie,” I said quietly to myself.
My little lady bug skated up next to me and said, “Noooooo Mommy, not like that, like THIS! Left, Right, Slide, Glide,” and she pushed off and across the rink away from me.
“Ok,” I said to myself, “You can do this. Left, Right, Slide, Glide.”
It didn’t come fast, but suddenly I was SKATING.
I giggled out loud and said to myself, “Seeee….you got this girl!”
I skated around that rink and other people repeating, “Left, Right, Slide, Glide,” for the next couple of hours.
It wasn’t graceful.
There wasn’t ANYTHING remotely glamorous about it.
I would love to tell you that skating that day went off without any more falls or aches and pains.
The reality is that it DID NOT.
I fell probably 35 times that day, and I learned to fall gracefully thanks to the likes of my 4 ½ and 16 days old Little Princess.
I watched all walks of life that day scoot around that rink, and I was PROUD for TRUSTING in myself enough to TRY something new.
Fast forward to present day as my not so Little Princess found her way back to the ice.
It wasn’t as graceful as it had been 14 years earlier, but she DEFINITELY felt better on those hockey skates than she did Figure Skates.
I was still skating around the other end of the rink when I saw her go down.
Instantly my Momma’ Bear instincts kick in as I pushed off towards her.
The fall had knocked the wind out of her.
It was hard not to reach out and embrace her.
Instead, I just asked, “You ok kiddo’?”
She looked at me and said, “Yeah it just knocked the wind out of me.”
I wondered if she was going to give up, but as her boyfriend skated away she grabbed a cheater pusher and followed suit.
I smiled ear to ear and turned to check on Morgan.
His legs were still tired so he wanted to rest, but he wanted to be a PART of what was happening.
So the young man that I like to call my future Son-In-Law remedied the situation and found Morgan a chair so he could be involved in all things skating.
I scurried off to grab the chair so Morgan could BE involved.....
The laughs, the giggles, the smiles.
It was worth every second, and it made me wonder how different the circumstances would be if I had given up TRYING so long ago.
How different that day would have been if my Meeshka' hadn't just TRUSTED in herself to KNOW she could do it.....
We do that to ourselves.
We underestimate our own potential, our own greatness.
Instead, we need to TRUST the process & remember that we don’t have to be PERFECT!
I often think that is 99.9% of the problem.
We think that we have to be like EVERYONE else.
That our journeys are all the same, when in reality they truly aren’t.
They aren’t meant to be.
It is how we choose to handle the situations that cross our paths that make us who we are and our journey’s unique.
I could have chosen to give up on skating, or on myself that day so long ago.
Looking back I am SO glad that I loved being a Mommy MORE than I loved failure.
I would have MISSED those moments at open skate with ALL of my Littles.
Chances are that I would have by-passed the event when it crossed my feed on Facebook, and told myself, “Ah, you can’t skate anyway no point in attending.”
It took all of 7 words to turn my world around back then.
“You don’t have to be perfect Mommy.”
So that is my advice to you today, remember that, embrace that.
You don’t have to be perfect.
You just have to TRY.
Looking back over the course of the past 14 years, I wish I had remembered my Little Princesses advice back then.
Trusted in me MORE.
Trusted in the PROCESS even more than that.
However, we often LEARN along the way, and most times hindsight is 20/20.
If you take ANYTHING away from this, my only wish is that you stay true to YOU, and remember that nothing is perfect.
Think about it like this:
When you are driving West towards a sunset surrounded by clouds, the SUN doesn’t STOP BEING itself…..It just SHINES brightly through
WHATEVER is surrounding it giving off its light and love to all lucky enough to view it.
It is most DEFINITELY not perfect, but it is SO, SO beautiful…..
If the sun can be beautiful in the most awful of circumstances even when it isn’t perfect or ideal….
Well, then why do you have to try so hard to be perfect?
Just throwing that at out there.....
Much Loves & Many Blessings Y'all.