Failure and I

The other day Queen Mab and I were working companionably in the front office—I was sitting at the desk writing up documents for yet another job application, and she was at her little plastic table behind me making a hand puppet out of a paper bag.* Suddenly she burst into tears and appeared at my elbow, clutching her puppet and demanding that I do part of it for her because it was terrible and ugly and she hated it (more or less). I gave her some suggestions and sent her back to her table.

After several iterations of this, though, I pointed out the easel next to my desk. David made it for me our senior year of high school. It was the first big thing he made out of wood. Even at the time that he made it, he was frustrated by its many flaws, and today he can’t even bring himself to look at it, because with skill and experience he’s come to see even more of them.

With bonus Mr. B

But if he hadn’t made that flawed easel eleven years ago, he wouldn’t have learned how to do better, and he wouldn’t have built me a perfect blue pine bookshelf in an hour the other day when we got tired of storing my books in boxes on the floor. I told her that if she practiced something now, even if she wasn’t good at it, that was the only way to get better.

Also, my bookshelf has a wizard.

She finished the puppet, whose shirt was a little aggressively colored out of frustration, but overall is a perfectly satisfactory creation for someone who hasn’t started kindergarten yet.

A couple days later, I realized the irony and hypocrisy of this conversation. Because I have spent most of the summer wallowing in my failure to get someone to give me a paycheck. This is a new experience for me.

If it hadn’t been for being on the track team in high school, I would have had little-to-no experience failing up to this point—the things that I really cared about I always ended up accomplishing (even if not quite as well as I would have liked). I married the first guy I ever dated, completed all the degrees I set out to complete, conceived, birthed, and nursed two children in *almost* the exact way I had hoped, attended every conference I submitted an abstract to except one (oh, Iceland—someday I will see your volcanoes and glaciers!), and the one article that I submitted for publication was accepted easily (albeit a year later :-P).

Note how many of these things depend on luck or the preferences of other people rather than my own amazingness.

Of course, because I’ve always been so successful at the things that really matter to me (and even a lot of the things that didn’t matter so much), I dread failure.

After countless job applications (literally—I long ago lost count of the applications I’ve submitted), the occasional “what did you do today anyway?” from my husband (not in so many words—he’s generally more tactful than that!) and frequent episodes of losing my temper in an ugly way at my eldest, I feel like the inverse of that “All I Do Is Win” song as lip-synced by Emma Stone on Jimmy Fallon—all I do is fail.

This, of course, is not entirely true. The other day I made two amazing loaves of bread, a quart of fabulous frozen custard with raspberries from the farmers market, and a surprisingly yummy experimental soaked-flour zucchini bread recipe using zucchini from my garden. This afternoon Mab and I had fun practicing fractions on the front porch (pedagogical insight: fractions make a lot more sense if you replace the word “circle” with “pizza.”). 

All of these things are successes. But they are so small. Today I wanted to walk the kids to the library and playground, but for various minor reasons (excuses?) it didn’t happen. At least I renewed the books online.

All my successes are tiny, but my failures come in every size.

This, I think, is the part where I should talk about how I’m going to be ok with these little successes, that failures now are somehow preparing me for something better later like I told Mab, that that’s what life is made of, that little successes are really big successes etc etc. Also, if this was a testimony or something like that, after I come to terms with what I’ll call my “redefinition of success,” something surprisingly wonderful will happen.

These things are probably true (except maybe that last one—I don’t live in an inspirational baseball movie), but I’m just not feeling it today.  

But I'll try again tomorrow.

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*I wrote this paragraph the night before I started writing the rest of this, just thinking about Mab and that easel, but then I sat back down this afternoon and saw the word “failure” at the top of the page, and suddenly it resonated with me. A lot.