10 mistakes

About a month ago, while looking through my sons weekly school papers, I came across a sign up sheet for a special parent night at his school. Topics to be discussed were test anxiety, self esteem, attendance issues, and a few others. Trying to do my best to help my chickadees I signed up, wrote the date on the calendar, notified the Hubs and lined up my daughter to babysit, as it fell on scout night.
To be completely honest, I dread school functions. I enjoy meeting the teacher, and seeing the art work, I just have this constant fear that I will trip and fall in front of everyone, including my children's classmates and teachers, or do the dreaded toilet paper behind my shoe march, and end up on the Christmas party gag real. The T.P thing hasn't happened to me yet, and so I figure that my lotto ticket is almost up on that one. Simply put, I am in perpetual fear of making a mistake.
I find that I often make the mistake of becoming impatient with my own children's mistakes. While a juice spill is not the end of the world, the fact that my 2 year old tries to make an art project with the juice I am desperately trying to clean up is some days just too much. Funny looking back, but in the moment, not so much.
The dreaded Thursday rolled around. It was busy as most Thursdays are, homework, dinner, a broken tooth thrown in just for fun, you know how it goes. As I drove up to the school, the parking lot that is usually overflowing on parents night, was almost empty. "Oh no, I must have written down the time wrong," once again beating myself up for a small mistake. With a quick call home to double check that I was indeed in the right place at the right time, I parked and entered.
The meeting had already begun and I quietly found a seat. Discussions carried on about end of grade exams and how to deal with the anxiety that exists in children who, make good grades all year, but are somehow convinced that they will be held back. They went on to something they call "school refusal". Yep folks, they finally have a name for the "syndrome" that caused me to cry each and every day from K5 to 10th grade. Unfortunately they do not know the exact cause or solution and so that too will have to go on my handy "when I have time for therapy" list, along with my dread of parents night, and my constant quest to find clothing to match the school decor, so that on parents night I can just blend and disappear.:). The moderators would begin another topic and some of the parents would chime in with questions or replies. I sat quietly on my stoop watching, listening, and taking note to call my mom about the school refusal thing. At some point the Assistant Principle jumped into the conversation and honest to goodness completely changed the way look at things.
He said that he had a poster in his office that reads,"I must make at least 10 mistakes today." Simple thought right? I find it rather profound.
We all make mistakes. Sometimes they are little mistakes like spilling juice, writing the wrong date on the calendar, or washing the new red socks with my husbands khaki work pants. Then there are the big ones, hurting someone we love, forgetting to pick the kids up at school( my tickets up on that one too, which is why my calendar is really messy). No matter the size, we all make them, and most times it seems that we beat ourselves up for the little as much as we do the big. It is easy to fall into a world where we focus on our own shortcomings rather than look at the fact that we try really hard to do the right thing.
By the time I arrived home it was jammie and bed time and so I didn't have a chance to share this new found insight with the kidlets. Friday afternoon the buses brought them home and they were ready to start the weekend. As I began to tell them of the newest house rule their faces carried looks of dread. I'm sure that thoughts of new chores were rolling around in their noggins. "From now on" I began as my little boy held his breath and my sweet girl winced,"We have to make at least 10 mistakes per day, now if you can't it's o.k., but you have to at least try." They looked at me, having no idea where this came from, or if I had actually said what I had intended. Deciding that it might be better to just accept it, rather than alert me to the fact that I may have misspoken, they went in separate directions to begin their two days of relaxation.
We are all settling into the new regime. I have thought of getting a dry erase board so that we can list all of the silly things that we do, it might be a bit to hard in the beginning, and so it will wait for while. I ask the kids daily if they have met their quota. Yesterday upon my son's arrival home I asked him how many mistakes he had made and he announced, grinning,"None". Not ten minutes later, he spilled salsa on the counter and inside the bag of tortilla chips. Thankfully, my two year old budding artist was with the grandparents, or we would have had quite the fiesta. As we cleaned up the mess he apologized. I told him that it was no big deal, and reminded him that last week I let the little one put a bar of soap in the fish tank and just this morning, I forgot to feed the cats. See how it works?