I have found in my many interactions on the 'net' that many of us had less than perfect childhoods. Sad??? Very, but unfortunately true. It took me many years to finally look in the mirror and say, "I'm okay!". I found this article (don't remember where) but it really hit home. . . it is called "YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE PERFECT TO BE LOVED", written by Harold S. Kushner.

I stood by the bed of a dying congregant and asked him if he wanted me to pray for him--or was he so angry at God for what was happening that prayer would only make him feel worse? He looked at me and said, "No, I'm not angry at God. There have been plenty of times when I felt that I had done so many things wrong, I figured God had given up on me. But lying here in the hospital, I've felt God's presence in this room."

He went on: "When I was young, I thought I had to be perfect for people to love me. I thought that if I ever did something wrong, their love would be withdrawn. So every time I did something wrong, I would make excuses, I would lie, I would try to find someone else to blame. I didn't realize what an unpleasant person I became when I acted that way. I thought it was my imperfection, not my defensiveness, that turned people off. But lying here in the hospital--sick and cranky and dying, but feeling God's presence in the doctors and nurses who try to help me, in the friends and family who come to visit me--I've finally learned that you don't have to be perfect to be worth loving. I only wish I hand known that sooner."

I thought I had to be perfect. Where did so many of us get that notion? Did we get it from parents who hoped we would make up for the empty spaces in their own lives? From teachers who took for granted everything we did right and focused on every mistake? From religious leaders who told us how Adam and Eve broke one rule and were punished forever?

Do women get that message of perfection from movies and fashion ads, featuring actresses and models with figures they can't hope to match? Do men get it from relentless pressure to sell more, to earn more, and from a society that makes fun of the losers in the Super Bowl for being only the second-best football team in the world?

I think of the organizers of the National Spelling Bee, who, every year at the finals, have to provide a "comfort room" where children who have spelled hundreds of words perfectly can go to cry, throw things and be comforted by their parents when they finally make one mistake. The hundreds of correct words are forgotten as they feel like failures for having gotten one word wrong.

I don't believe in a God who looks for reasons to punish people for being less than perfect. I think it is bad religion to teach that, just as it is a mistake for parents to be excessively disappointed every time their child makes a mistake. I believe in a God who knows how complicated human life is, how difficult it is to be a good person at all times, and who expects not a perfect life but an honest effort a a good one.

For me, the biblical story of the Garden of Eden is the story of how Adam and Eve had to learn that there are such things as Good and Evil, of how they came to understand that certain things are wrong. As a result, human life is so complicated that even the best people can't get everything right every time.

Why did God make human life so complicated? Maybe because God loves goodness more than perfection and appreciates our struggle to achieve good as morally preferable to our being programmed to be perfect. If God could not love flawed, imperfect people, God would be very lonely, because imperfect people are the only ones around. And if we can't accept and love people with all of their imperfections, we condemn ourselves to loneliness as well.

We need to stop blaming our parents for having made mistakes in raising us. They were amateurs when it came to raising children--a task where even experts don't always know the answers. In their loving, faltering way, they gave us something more valuable than a perfect childhood. They taught us what a complicated thing love is, what a challenge it is to love and raise a child. And as we grow up and become parents ourselves, we grow to appreciate that.

We owe our children the right to make mistakes and to learn from them. When our children were first learning to walk, taking tentative steps and falling down, we didn't scold them for being clumsy. We praised them for trying to do something new and challenging. We can do our children no bigger favor than to maintain that attitude as they grow up. I have visited classrooms where children were so tense for fear of giving a wrong answer, so fearful of being scorned for asking a question, there was no possibility of any learning going on.

The story of George Washington and the cherry tree may be an outdated fable, but the point of the story is still valid: Our children need to know that we will not stop loving them any time they do wrong. Without that reassurance, we don't teach them to be perfect; we teach them to be liars.

We need to understand that the essence of married love is not romance but forgiveness. I once heard a woman describe how she and her husband had arrived an hour late for a party, because he had refused to stop and ask for directions. A young single woman in the group said, "If some guy did that to me, I'd stop the car, get out, take a cab home and never speak to him again." I had to restrain myself from saying to her, "Have you no quirks that would drive someone crazy if he didn't love you enough to put up with them?" Romantic love needs to deny and overlook flaws. But mature love sees the faults in ourselves and in the ones we love and is capable of loving flawed people.

We need to give ourselves permission to be human, to try and to stumble, to be momentarily weak and feel shame but to overcome that shame with moments of strength, courage and generosity. We need to learn to define ourselves not by our worst moments but by our more typical ones. Life is not a spelling bee where one mistake wipes out all the things we have done right. Life is not a test for which the passing grade is 100 percent and anything less is a failure. Maybe when it comes to building bridges and space capsules, one mistake renders the entire project worthless. But life is so much more complicated than building bridges or space capsules that we can't expect ourselves or anyones else to do it error-free.

Life is like the baseball season, where even the best team loses at least a third of its games and even the worst team has its days of brilliance. The goal is not to win every game but to win more than you lose, and if you do that often enough, in the end you may find you have won it all.

So, with or without my parents approval, this is now how I chose to live my life. For sooooooooo many years, they controlled my every action and if it tried to make my own decisions, well. . .they were never good enough. After Kere's death, I attended counselling faithfully for an entire year. I asked my mother to go, but she refused. After that year, I am now able to say when asked, "I have no close family". The reactions to that statement are mixed. Those that don't understand, have never been there, so they can't imagine. I have since had to make my own "family", which consists of my husband, his family and our friends. I know now that I am no less of a person, but I am a happy one!!