now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good

how letting go of perfectionism transformed my motherhood

Perfectionism has followed me like a shadow my whole life. Wherever I was, and whatever I was doing, it was there, whispering in my ear “that’s not good enough”. I didn’t just want everything to be done to a high standard, I wanted things to be perfect, which meant that I often avoided doing things I wasn’t already good at. My standards were unreasonably and irrationally high. Any slight blemish or imperfection appeared to me to be a huge glaring flaw. Fear of failure meant that I also spent a lot of time procrastinating, because my internal motto was closer to better to have not tried than to have tried and failed than well begun is half done. This is a common dynamic, and one that some of you will no doubt be familiar with.

Now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

John Steinbeck

Prior to becoming a mother, I had never really challenged my perfectionism. Instead of doing the messy and uncomfortable work of tackling it I avoided it. I stuck to things I was pretty confident about, or threw myself enthusiastically into things I had a natural aptitude for, like yoga. It even blighted things I loved and was good at, like cooking. If I made a meal that fell below my standards even slightly, I would react out of all proportion. It was a disaster, not just a mishap. It wasn’t serving me, but I could live with it. When I became a mother, this approach ceased to be tenable.

I could no longer avoid doing anything that I didn’t feel confident about. In fact, motherhood was mostly doing things I didn’t feel confident about. And I couldn’t just quit, I had to keep going. I have talked in previous posts about my experience of early motherhood, which you can read about here and here and here if you’re interested. My perfectionism was one of the things that contributed to the feelings of inadequacy and failure I felt as a new mother.

I entered motherhood bursting with good intentions and noble ambitions. I was going to be the most attuned, responsive mother. I was going to use cloth nappies and cook everything from scratch to reduce our environmental impact. I was going to exclusively breastfeed and babywear etc etc.¹ Like other type-A moms before me, I was approaching motherhood like a competitive sport; and I planned to win.

These were all good ambitions, and I’m not saying that having high standards for yourself as a mother is a bad thing. I’m a big believer in striving for excellence in all areas of life, but my unchecked perfectionism meant I had an all or nothing attitude that was completely counterproductive and consistently made me feel miserable. Turns out that when you do things you’ve never done before, you generally aren’t brilliant at them straight away. Anytime I made a mistake, or didn’t quite meet my exacting standards, I would spiral into self-blame and criticism, often with a healthy dose of catastrophizing.

“I should have known better”

“I should have done X instead”

“Everything is my fault”

“I’ve ruined everything”

“I’m a terrible mother”

You get the picture.

If you are stuck battling perfectionism, then I want to encourage you. Almost three years into motherhood, this is something I struggle with much less. It’s still there, and probably always will be in some form, but it doesn’t dominate my life in the same way it once did. I don’t have a quick fix to offer, but here a few practices that I have found helpful in my battle against my inner perfectionist.

Name the problem. Simply acknowledging to myself that I had these perfectionist tendencies helped. Admitting out loud to my long suffering husband that yes, I could be unreasonable and perfectionist, and no, taking a wrong turn actually isn’t that big of a deal, was an important first step for me.

Challenge the false dichotomy that perfectionism is necessary to maintain high standards and pursue excellence. I’ve actually come to believe that perfectionism is the enemy of anyone seeking to grow in excellence. In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed argues convincingly that not only is failure inevitable, but in fact the crucial determinant of success is an acknowledgement of failure and a willingness to engage with it. Refusing to let yourself fail means you will never be able to learn from your mistakes.

Model self-acceptance and patience to your children. One day I realised that if I didn’t get my perfectionism and self-criticism under control, then I would end up passing it on to my daughters, and perpetuating the cycle for another generation. I’ve talked before about how our children often mirror our behaviour, and this was a big part of the motivation I needed to really challenge my own inner dialogue. My fear of failure was rooted in the faulty belief that I was only worthy of love if I was perfect.² I didn’t want my children inheriting this belief and being limited by fear of failure, or crippled by the haunting sense that nothing they did was ever quite good enough. At first it was easier practicing acceptance and patience with my daughter, and then gradually I found I could apply the same attitude towards myself.

Write down what your values and priorities are. Once I began trying to articulate what my priorities were, I realised that quite a lot of the things I was stressing myself out about were actually *not* that important to me after all. They were ‘nice to haves’ that I was treating like ‘must haves’. My husband and I sat down and talked in depth about what our values and priorities were, and from that we were able to flesh out a shared vision for family life. The things that were genuinely important to us, like having a shared family meal in the evening, we prioritised, and everything else we began to relax our grip on.

Accept that you don’t need to control everything. You also can’t control everything when you have small children. One of the things I found hardest to adjust to was suddenly finding that we were constantly late for everything now that we had two small children in tow. I’ve always been punctual, and I would get very stressed at the mere thought of being late. I’m coming up on three years of motherhood, and I’ve only recently accepted that whilst it is good to try and be on time, especially in a professional context, sometimes it just isn’t possible with little people. Allowing life to just be and unfold organically has been really important for me in my battle against perfectionism. Not everything has to be optimised for efficiency and productivity.

Choose to take action, even if it’s imperfect. One of the pernicious lies that perfectionism tells is that it is better to not do something than to do it imperfectly. This is a lie, and it is a lie that will slowly rob you of your agency and sense of purpose. Do not let perfectionism make you feel like a victim of your own motherhood. Serendipitously,

Helen Roy

has just published a post that details a practical approach to rejecting a victim mentality and embracing action in motherhood:

Here’s where all the principles dovetail together. The COURAGE mentality encourages lonely people to find friendship in the world, despite potential rejection. The CONSISTENCY mentality fosters a willingness to fail or to be rejected, and once friends are found, keeps them close through a sense of mutual duty and sacrifice. And CREATIVITY helps on the front end to find your people, and then again, to keep in touch with them.

Done is better than perfect has become something of a mantra for me over the last three years. Perfectionism has caused me to delay taking action so many times in my life. I talked about starting my wedding planning business for two years before I actually did it because I was internally convinced that I wasn’t good enough and that I would fail. Without the repeated encouragement of

Amber Adrian

(THANK YOUU) I would probably still be waiting to post my first Substack post because it wasn’t quite perfect. I have an essay languishing in my drafts that I want to submit to one of my favourite publications, but haven’t done because I don’t think it’s good enough yet. Even writing this post has taken far longer than it should have done, because my imposter syndrome and perfectionism has driven me to rewrite paragraphs multiple times because “this isn’t any good”. The irony that I am writing about perfectionism is not lost on me.

Motherhood has taught me that chasing perfection is futile, as life with small children is full of interruptions, little (and big) frustrations, and last minute changes. I have learnt that I cannot, and should not seek to, control everything. Instead of wasting these years with my tiny ones attempting to force some kind of illusory perfection, I have instead decided to embrace the chaotic and imperfect reality.

I want to avoid spending another week trying to craft the perfect closing paragraph, so I’m going to leave it now and finish with a few questions for you, my readers:

How has perfectionism impacted your experience of motherhood?

What have you found helpful in overcoming perfectionism and imposter syndrome?

Thank you for reading, I appreciate all of you for being here.

Becca x

1. Some of those things did end up happening, but mostly because my baby didn’t give me much of a choice in the matter. She flatly refused to take breast milk in a bottle, let alone formula. She would only sleep on or next to me for the first year of her life, so we coslept out of necessity as much as anything else.

2. For more on this idea see

Amber Adrian

’s excellent recent article Childhood Is Not A Performance