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ILLUSTRATION BY KAREN SHANGGUAN/The Globe and Mail

First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.

My daughter kept coming to my room every 15 minutes, double-checking every single detail for the next day, she wanted to make sure everything would be perfect for her birthday.

“What time will you wake up,” she asked, while biting her nail anxiously – that was something I found myself doing on numerous occasions and had unknowingly passed the habit on to her.

“I will wake up at 7 and prepare everything. Don’t worry please! Your party is at noon, we have plenty of time, just relax.” I opened my arms to hug her, and whispered in her ear, “I know you’re excited, but I want you to have fun, leave the worry to me.” She smiled and kissed me.

My daughter is like many kids: She gets stressed over events, planning and scheduling. She worries that something can go wrong, she needs a list, she needs a schedule and time frames. When she was younger I thought that she was like me – a planner – and I was happy and proud. But it became more apparent that she is like me in ways I don’t want her to be: She stresses over small details; she wants everything to be perfect.

As an adult I have a hard time dealing with setbacks and disappointments. I raise expectations for myself as well as others, only to discover how devastating and nerve wracking it is to live in a utopian life that my mind has made up.

Perfectionism, I’ve learned, is a mirage that you keep chasing, and every time you think you are getting closer to your goal, it moves further away. It is a wild goose chase you cannot win.

Last Christmas when the kids were having professional photographs taken, I kept agonizing that my four-year-old wasn’t wearing dress shoes but his favourite Paw Patrol sneakers. Truth be told, my son couldn’t care less about his shoes, and it really didn’t matter – except to me.

Many times we create a picture perfect life, or situation, in our heads, and it hurts when that picture doesn’t turn out the way we want it to. When my perfect pictures fell apart, I would start to panic and feel guilty.

Why do we do it? Why did I have this standard I had to reach to feel better about myself and my life? Maybe it’s all the stories you hear growing up or the pretentious images of a perfect life we see on social media, in advertising and from Hollywood. But we need to choose our own stories, we need to make our own standards and live them.

And as much as I hate to admit it, I’ve realized that I have to make a change. I want to change for my daughter’s sake, to help her grow up strong in a world that will let her down, disappoint her and perhaps even mock her perfectionism.

Parenting is hard and challenging, and when you suffer from anxiety yourself, it doesn’t make it easier, but it does help you identify those small traits in your kids. When you are a veteran of coping with anxiety episodes, you know the tools to deal with that and want to pass them on.

My anxiety stems from my perfectionism, from the fear that I need to control everything around me. Last year I had so many things added to my life unexpectedly that turned it upside down. I struggled both mentally and physically, I didn’t realize that my struggles were fueled by my resistance to my new “normal”: Will I be strong enough to get out of bed? Will my anxiety be tamed enough that I can finish all my errands or will I spiral into a series of “What ifs?” that drain me to exhaustion.

I was still holding on to that false illusion that I have to do everything or else I’m not good enough, that If I ask for help, it means I’m weak. I’d raised the bar for “good mom” so high that I would never be able to reach it.

And in the midst of this, there was one person studying me, imitating me: my nine-year-old daughter. She is the one person I thought I needed to be perfect for, but I realize now how wrong I was.

As a parent, all we want for our kids is for them to be happy, worry free, stress free. But I could see my little girl wouldn’t be any of these until I started to make some changes myself. If I want my kids to grow up strong mentally, then I have to forget that unreal images that I build within my own mind.

As a mother, I started to give myself a break. I let myself make excuses. I gave myself the occasional pat on the back and a thumbs up, even if all I’d done was make the morning coffee. By changing my thoughts about what I thought was expected, by accepting that life changes and that I have limits, I found my daughter now accepts her flaws more easily. She has become more relaxed, she is willing to ask for help and feels better about trying and failing.

Children have this amazing ability to sense our emotions. That’s why I’ve learned to love myself with all my flaws and disabilities, because when my kids see me happy – even when I struggle – it helps them, too. This is the ultimate perfectionism.

Karen Habashi lives in Langley, B.C.

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