How many times I have started something, not to finish it. My mother used to tell me it was my worst fault. She would become so annoyed when I would quit my lessons, quit brownies, quit an endless number of activities that she felt were worthwhile and broadening and that I hated. As I grew older I realized that most of us have this fault. We all start out with the best of intentions and somewhere along the way we lose interest. This can be particularly annoying to those around us when they are depending upon us to hold up our part of the bargain. Who can forget the person who walks out of the job on the day that they are most needed, or the person who promises to bring the cookies for the tea and calls at the last minute with lame excuses or worse yet just doesn't show up. Or more painfully, the father who leaves his family with no warning, or the mother who is unwilling to parent and so just lets whatever happens happen. And then there is the spouse who realizes belatedly that marriage isn't really what he or she is interested in and be it one year or fifty the betrayal of that commitment is not forgotten.
In so many ways we fail those who depend upon us. More importantly we fail ourselves. The list of those failures follows us around like a naughty list for the kid who's getting the lump of coal at Christmas. We beat ourselves up with our failures and if we are really into narcissistic punishment one failure begets another and another until we are sunk in a pit of depression that is hard to climb out of. And we wonder why we are the Prozac nation.
We can recite line and verse the litany of our mistakes, if not out loud certainly loudly enough that we ourselves cannot forget. Whether the world recognizes our essential failures we recognize them. For every good thing that you can say about me there is a yes but in response. It is a neurotic and damning way of life that is reinforced by each new mistake. And if someone is so lucky not to have this particular neurosis we brand them uncaring at the least, character disordered at the most extreme. We want our friends to have been raised by mothers, whether Jewish or not, who have taught them the value of guilt if not the value of following through.
I would like to propose though an essential human truth that our mother's may not have been quite as keen for us to learn. We are sinners, we make mistakes, we often don't have what it takes to stay the course. We learn by trial and error, usually remembering most keenly those lessons that resulted in our falling on our butts. We are not perfected. Far from it. If commitment has a value in the course of our lives it is in the fact that each time we try again to stick to something we become stronger, better able to hang in there, more able to appreciate that sometimes the very act of staying the course makes us better able to see what the course is. But this is a lesson learned over a lifetime of getting it wrong. Instead of beating ourselves mercilessly over the head for each failure we need to look through the lens of our lives and see how each one has led us towards a more enduring and persistent ability to be committed.
Of course there are those of us who don't learn this lesson. But for those of us who do the other thing our mother's never told us is that it can take a lifetime to know one's truth, to pin down one's desire, to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, and find the small wonderful nugget of truth that defines us. We are not born knowing what commitments we are worthy of. We cannot know easily or quickly which of lifes lures is a trap and which a call to true faith. We are not easily persuaded to give our all and yet ultimately giving our all is what makes us not sinners but saints.
This is what I wish my mother had said to me. Child, instead of evaluating your life by your failures, evaluate each of your failures to understand what it says about you. Because each time you make this examination you will get closer to understanding what is most important for you in your life and how you must go about committing yourself to it. Let your failures be your teachers. Your life is a process of learning how to commit.
Love, Mom
