“We’ve been planning to meet. But we can’t decide on a date, time, or location.” ~The Mister in describing his membership in the faux self-help group “Choicemakers”
I mentioned that I was thinking about merging my vintage food blog with this blog on the Facebook fan page last week and asked for feedback. Although I was sure that I was going to do it, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything major. A few people confirmed my rationale right away (without my prompting) and so I completed the merger. And then Maria Welsh said something that really jumped out at me:
Hi, like that you have gone with your “heart right” feelings – that’s what a Retro Woman would do. Modern women keep looking for answers and not go with the flow! Good choice!!
It is so true! We agonize and ruminate over our decisions. We search the Internet for answers. We buy 300 books on the same topic to find out what the experts tell us to do. We ask everyone we know what we should do. And then we ask them again, saying “Are you sure I’m making the right decision??”
Have we become so embroiled in our need “to do everything just right” that our confidence in our own abilities and decision-making have been destroyed?
I’m not saying that we need to be impulsive. Many regrets are made from giving into impulses. What I am saying is that we need to incorporate what Coach John Wooden would call Initiative on his Pyramid of Success. As he says, “Make a decision! Failure to act is often the biggest failure of all.”
We are all going to have failures. It is part of life. Some people would view my Betty Crocker and Me blog as a failure. Not me. I took the initiative and gave it a go. It didn’t work out. But at least I tried and I learned about myself along the way.
Being a 1950s homemaker does not mean we have to be perfect. It means that we have confidence in our ability to stretch our comfort zone in the choices that we make.
This post hits at the heart of what some fellow moms and I talk about often. Trying to trust our own instincts and not being afraid of failure is a step in the right direction for most of us. Thanks for the insight!
Melissa, I don’t know why but your comment made me think about parenting and teaching. I remember when I used to teach a human development course to future teachers, we’d talk about the need to let children experience mistakes and failures so that they could learn to develop self-confidence. If children don’t learn how they can recover from mistakes/failure, they can’t develop self-confidence.
I’ll admit that I fear for children of “helicopter parents.” These children aren’t learning how to be autonomous and to trust their instincts.
I admit I do agonize over some decisions, like where to send my kids to pre-school – I know this sounds totally neurotic. but, last year I just send my son to the closest nursery school and it was not a great experience – and it is a big investment of our time and money. I know we all have great expectations of pre-school, that it should be a happy experience, because school just gets more serious as it goes on, and we want our kids to have a positive feeling about school.
I don’t belive in hellicopter parently, but it is a differnt world and kindness is not valued. I know a lot of parents who would 100% prefer their kids to be a bully than to be bullied.
I think this is a super important topic though – I talk about it with my husband a lot – the importance of turning in a ‘rough draft’ and not being paralized by a sense of doing somehting ‘perfectly’. The picture is so funny because of course we DID agonize over our paint colors – and WE (unlike this couple) decided to paint almost our whole house YELLOW.
“Betty Crocker and Me” was a wonderful idea and a great blog. It was not a failure. You just decided it needed to come back over here.
I’m a great agonizer. And then I will agonize over the choices I made that didn’t work out — sometimes with attendant guilt. But as my husband and I discussed such choices last week, he said, “Kathy, we always thought we were doing the right thing at the time. We did the best we could at the moment. Now we have to let it go.” In recent years I’ve tried to stop the “I should have” thinking. Hindsight is 20-20, as they say.
And — oh yes — we agonized over the paint colors. We ended up with shades of white in brown tones with color spots throughout the house. Sometimes you just have to work through the agony because no one else can help you. Same with fabric choices . . .