The Well-Lived Life by Gladys McGarey

Author:Gladys McGarey [McGarey, Gladys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

EMBRACING IMPERFECTION

When my first child, Carl, was born, I was living in Cincinnati and had made friends with another young mother down the road who had a son the same age. We were both interns at the same hospital, and we had some things in common. Carl and Harry started playing together as soon as they were old enough to be off our laps. They got along, but each played in a different way—in part because our parenting styles were so different. Carl was an adventurous kid whom Bill and I encouraged to crawl, climb, and get dirty. Harry’s mother sent him out to play wearing gloves and sometimes on a leash.

Nowadays, there’s plenty of information available that tells young parents the importance of letting their kids get a little dirty. Most people know that an overly sterile environment isn’t great for their children’s development. But Harry’s mother’s medical training had focused on germ theory, which was solely about killing diseases, and she was doing the best she could with the information she had. Like so many other women, she had been taught that there were specific things she could do to be a “good mom,” and keeping her son away from germs was one of them.

Both Harry and his mother were also my patients. I saw them a lot because Harry was frequently sick. He picked up all sorts of bugs, despite his mother’s best efforts. Once, as Carl was playing in the dirt while Harry sat quietly watching, she asked me, “Why is it that Carl is only rarely sick but Harry comes to see you in the clinic so often? I’m so careful with him!”

I laughed and explained that Carl likely had a stronger immune system. I exposed him to the world, and he was more resilient for it.

This story isn’t remarkable on its own. Yet when taken as a metaphor, it has a lot to teach us. There are some things that are truly harmful—hot stoves, high cliffs, venomous snakes—and Harry’s mother would have been right to protect him from those. But she took it too far, and he suffered as a result. This is precisely how community works. Yes, some people can truly hurt us, it’s true. But when we overly protect ourselves from others, we cut ourselves off from the very interactions that could serve us. We were born in a world full of people because we’re meant to be around people, with all the messiness that entails.

We often don’t interact with one another because we don’t want to get our hands dirty. We don’t want to deal with what we perceive to be others’ deficits. We want to protect ourselves so we can’t be disappointed. But in the process, we miss out on life.

The advent of modern conveniences has made this easier. We have essentially sterilized our lives of the discomfort of “needing” one another. Today, if we are sufficiently economically comfortable, we’ve set up the entire world so we don’t have to ask anyone for anything.

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