All These Tidy Life Bows? Sorry, Gotta Go

All my life I’ve been obsessed with bows.

At Christmas I go nuts, the bigger and more elaborate, the better. I have a closet full of shoes with bows. If I’m in a home goods store and I pass by an item with a bow on it, it’s in my cart faster than you can say “cute”.

This summer I held up a t-shirt to my husband in a store and without skipping a beat he shrugged, “Well, you have to buy that.”

But as I barrel toward turning 50 (423 more days. Not that I’m counting.) I’m beginning to rethink my obsession with the bow.

Mostly, my metaphorical obsession. I’m reconsidering my propensity and hunger to “tie things up neatly” in an effort to make them look tidy and “clean.” My tendency to want life to look “pretty.”

Please do not get me wrong, I’m all for beauty. But real life—our daily choices, complex relationships, human experiences—doesn’t often lend itself to perfectly creased corners and tidily tied bows. 

As an example: last month I published an essay in the Huffington Post about parenting my son, navigating his ADHD meltdowns, and how I learned to face my own pent-up anger. 

Some folks have asked about how things are now. I find myself wanting to paint a picture of how great everything is now compared to some of those rough early years.

After the epiphany moment I describe in the essay, I learned all sorts of new parenting skills, my kid matured, and now our relationship is mostly smooth sailing.

Which, from one angle, is true. And, phew, that story arc is tidy—all tied up in a neat “afterschool special” bow!

On the other hand, life can still feel incredibly bumpy here some days. My kids spend way too much time on their screens. I see their emerging desires to impress others and I’m sometimes terrified about where those impulses could lead them. Their pre-frontal cortexes are dependably underdeveloped, and, despite my savvy parenting skills, I still struggle to find a way to say, “Let’s start some homework,” without launching WWIII many days.

I’m don’t want to tie this story up with a neat bow not only because it’s not honest, but also because I’ve begun to see it’s not useful.  

For me, the process of breaking up with perfectionism has meant acknowledging there mostly won’t be picture-perfect endings in life. The invitation each day seems to be to navigate each stretch of road as it comes, doing our best to find satisfaction in the small wins. 

This change in perspective feels a bit like maturing. When you’re a kid and you draw a mountain, it’s just a pointy-peaked triangle. It’s cute, but real mountains aren’t like that.

And my experience from hiking and backpacking is that mountains definitely don’t feel like that when you’re climbing them. When you’re hiking up a mountain, you’re going up, but it’s never just straight up. It’s more like up, then a bit down, then up, then down. It undulates.

You can’t see the top when you’re climbing, so you rarely know whether you’re close or not. Going up can feel like going down, and going down can sometimes feel even harder than the uphill climbs.

As I get closer to 50, I want my writing, and the way I think about my life, to be more like the experience of a real-life mountain than some idealized picture of one.

I want the experience of this newlsetter to feel like we are all going up the mountain together. Sometimes we’re on the uphill, sometimes on the downhill, most times not sure how close we might be to anything resembling a “top.” 

And finally, if and when we do get to whatever “top” lies ahead, I want to feel like the flag we plant needn’t be a tidy bow. (But it’d probably look cute if it was!)