Ode to the First Borns

When my father was a young boy, he got his picture published on the front page of his community’s newspaper in recognition of bravery for putting out a local fire. What the newspaper failed to report (for the sole reason that he hadn’t confessed) was that the young home-town hero had bravely extinguished a fire that he himself started!
As my first born is getting older, sometimes, I feel a little bit like my dad in this story. As I parent her through new challenges, we are battling fires that, somehow, I feel responsible for starting. From the beginning, I have been the parent who felt the subtle yet irresistible pull toward high expectations, especially when it came to my oldest. I have always felt impressed by her and confident of her emerging abilities. Believing so highly in her, I have observed myself challenging her, oftentimes, seduced to realms beyond what is developmentally appropriate. I still remember with a tinge of pain, the day I took her to kindergarten readiness testing. As I sat in the far corner of the room watching her tiny hands struggle through the most rudimentary of exercises, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Tears ran down my face as I encountered with fresh eyes, the violent dissonance between what I had been expecting of her and this more accurate picture. As a tender green shoot, she had just barely penetrated through the soil into this thing we call life and I had been trying to hang swings from her branches.
Flash forward five years. As I now watch this same little girl, I observe an emerging young lady with a broad, and at times overwhelming, sense of personal responsibility. As her mom, I have taken on the role of trying to help her be gracious with herself, to accept personal limitations, and to give herself as well as others ample space for being human. I want her to be able to cope with the fact that sometimes when you do your very best, it still isn’t enough. I want her to be able to live with the reality that sometimes others let us down. And so I try to help her, and yet I must sit with the awareness that her whole life I have challenged her toward excellence, inadvertently lighting the match of perfectionism and fanning the flames of personal striving.