What’s the most profound piece of advice you’ve been given? Did you take it?

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

I have been told this so many times in my life, except from the one person who probably caused me to need to hear this.

I have always strove to be the best version of myself that I can be. If I do something, I want it to be as perfect as I can possibly make it. It has taken a lot of years of having the right people around me and some good old fashioned talk therapy to start letting go of some of my perfectionism and too high standards for myself.

A lot of it is easy to dismiss when I begin to get bogged down with feelings. I think, if someone else did this what would I think? Most of the time, I would think they were awesome. I have been trying to let things go. I am also trending towards more hobbies that do not really have perfect outcomes. Gardening and photography. Sure you can have perfect things when doing them, but most of the time it is the imperfections that make it memorable.

The hardest thing for me has been being a parent. When you adopt, you have a lot of added pressure of living up to the parents that are no longer there. My kids did not have any memory of living with their birth mom and so in their minds she was this unattainable perfection. She was a dream. It was really hard to compete with that and I was really trying to not compete because I knew I would never win. Kids in general do a lot of comparisons to other families, other kids, other vacations, other holidays, and all that comparison makes it hard to be a human being. Humans are flawed by design. We resist conformity and when we embrace we still try and put our own spin on things.

To live with two people who depended on me for their emotional and physical well being and have them constantly tell me how inadequate I was… was really hard to deal with. It was also not offhanded comments like “So and so is so awesome,” it was literally “if you were a better mom I would not have these problems.” Which is not true. They had those problems for nearly a decade before I walked into their life. The rational part of my brain knows I am doing my best, but the other part of me is trying to be better, to fix something I cannot fix.

Then I hear, “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” It is true. I am internalizing everything and making other people’s feelings and words into my identity. It has always been hard for me to deal with my own internal monologue, but I struggle to let the external voices roll off my back. It is a process and I am trying. It is all I can do, it is all anyone can do.

In order for her to come live with us again, I have to let the hurt go. I am not sure I can. This new hurt is so raw and festering. Sometimes you can do everything right, and still have someone hurt you. The fact that I am struggling with this makes me feel like a terrible mother because I know she needs us and that she did not mean to hurt me. My feelings are valid, so every day I have to tell myself to go easy on the self hatred and focus on what I can actually do. I can heal, move forward, and not take on the failures of other people.