It was a dark and stormy late afternoon/early evening

Yesterday was intermittently thunderstormy most of the morning, but by midafternoon the skies had cleared and the sun was beginning to peek shyly around the clouds. Then, at nearly 5:00 when I was driving to my appointment with my therapist, five minutes late and taking a mental inventory of topics to discuss in my precious fifty-minute session, I finally looked up from my vehicular navel-gazing and noticed this storm front moving in quickly from the west:

Storm 1

It was surreal - to my left were sunny, obliviously cheerful skies; to my right was this massive wall of swirling cloud and doom. I committed a serious breach of the Good Driver's Code by snapping several pictures of it with my camera phone, just before I turned into the parking lot of my therapist's office suite.

I made it in the door just as the storm hit, rain and wind and lightning, pounding thunder that sounded like all the kids from Fat Camp were having a track meet on the roof. On speed. Just as we closed the door to her office, the power went out, so we held therapy by flashlight. It was cozy, like telling ghost stories around the campfire, only the ghost stories were less about highwaymen with hooks for hands and more about the thousand reasons that I feel inadequate as a mom, a wife, a daughter.

Over the past few sessions she's been helping me see how much I rule myself according to external feedback, external numeric feedback, and how this is making me unable to see the more abstract report card of two kids who are happy and healthy, a husband who loves me, a mostly-strong marriage. I have put so much energy into driving myself according to my weight, my ACT scores, my GPA, my store's weekly sales results. And except for my weight, my rigid dependence on these numbers have paid off: my ACT score was durn good; I graduated with a GPA above a 4.0; my store was always in the top of the district. But now that I'm a mom instead of a student or an employee, I don't get this same sort of feedback, no report card or annual performance review; the results I'm given are so much less tangible, less measurable. Now there's no grading scale for me to follow; I have to define success before I can strive for it.

Invariably, of course, I set the bar too high, and I fail. And I crumble. With two kids - a tantrum-throwing, melodramatic almost-two-year-old and a nervous, rigid preschooler - how can I continue to expect so much from myself, from them? What if success isn't a spotless carpet or a stovetop without any baked-on grunge? What if success is turning off the tv after Dragon Tales instead of leaving it on for the kids to veg out all morning? What if success is getting the laundry into the dryer before mildew sets in?