I have never in my life felt less adequate than I do parenting twin toddlers. Inadequacy stings my eyes, bruises my shins, inflames the poor, unsuspecting tendon that runs from the ball of my foot to my right big toe, and then, for good measure, sets Tonka trucks out on which I may break my soul in the dark.
Consider standing or kneeling between two crying children, each unable to tolerate your attention to the other, and each in urgent need of a hug—one because she’s terrified of a loud noise she just heard, and the other because he’s gashed his forehead. Even if your heart can manage it, your body cannot do or be enough. So when I say “I am inadequate,” I mean it in its purest sense. There is no way around.
I find… that I am fond of the word suboptimal.
It has heft, but also a nice patter, an interesting delicacy. I’ve rolled it around in my mouth and brain and have come to believe that in both sound and concept it is much more compelling than its counterpart, optimal, which I think is probably really just a neon foam-finger for disconsolation to jab in the face of imperfection.
“Optimal: best or most favorable,” says Google’s dictionary. If “best” is our only sweetheart, then what’s everything else? Are we going to relegate roughly 99.99% of our lives to the category of “suboptimal,” as if it were all just some unfortunate accident on the way to a scant handful of other, better moments?
I’ve had a few moments in my life that felt optimal. Actually just one: one time in college, I performed the Debussy String Quartet with three other students and I don’t think any of us could have played better. I count that night among the best moments of my life—because it felt almost otherworldly.
What about this world? When I look at the majority of the other brilliant moments from my life, they’re hardly “optimal”: the day my children were born, I did get to go paddling around in an ocean of oxytocin, but I was also a gnarly wreck with a terrible case of imposter syndrome and a suitcase full of trauma; at my wedding, I was truly thrilled, but so painfully self-conscious that it’s a wonder I could even walk; when I ran a half marathon faster than I thought I ever could, that was pretty neat, but I vomited all the way home, unaware that I’d run the race with a high fever which my nerves had masked.
The part where I started a paragraph with a caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly metaphor HAS BEEN DELETED BECAUSE MY DEGREE WAS NOT IN VAIN. In its place, the following: “the suboptimal is good and fine and great NOT because it’s on its way to something better, but because it, too, is life. In fact, it is, by definition, most of our lives.”
For example: we are in the middle of our twin toddlers’ 30-month sleep regression. During these regressions, which can go FOR OVER A MONTH (and that’s per kid; if they don’t start at the same time, you can be in for up to twice that), the child resists sleep, logic, cooperation, kindness, normal functioning, and your belief in humanity with surprisingly considerable effectiveness and power.
Sample discussion:
Me: What’s wrong? Can you use a word?
Child: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Me: How about you try a word and tell mama what you need?
Child: STRUCTION SIIIIIIIIIITE
Me: You want the Construction Site book?
Child: STRUCTION SIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE
Me: <hands child the book>
Child: <throws book> NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! <grief-stricken over the loss of the book> BINKIIIIIIIEEEEE
Me: <gives child a binkie>
Child: <throws binkie> BINKKIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
[etc. This scene doesn’t end just because the script does. In fact, this scene DOESN’T END.]
During these episodes, one has the opportunity to do things with one’s sleep-deprived mind like actually stopping and turning to yell unprintable things to a husband who has made a suggestion on how to handle the child who is running towards the road, whilst that child continues running towards the road.
[I could list a few of my other sparkling suboptimals, but you’d either not believe me or believe me, each of which is problematic.]
There are many reasons we must appreciate the less-than-best in ourselves, including that there wouldn’t be much left of us at all if we kept it just to the finest bits. Another is that we do not always know what is best. What feels lousy, or boring, or impossibly messed up, or too hard for words often shows itself only after the moment for what it is when viewed in full, which can be anything from “important to my learning” to “kind of OK” to “woah, wait…sublime?!”
I’m not saying that me screaming at my spouse while my toddler charges towards a vehicle thoroughfare is somehow magically beautiful because I learned something from the toughness of the experience. It’s not, and I didn’t. I was a hot mess and so was my kid. I didn’t so much learn something as I got a little seasoned by it.
And you can’t make a meal with one flavor.
Me and Debussy and my kid’s elbow in my eyeball? Marital yelling at the playground? It’s all my life. We may as well add the night-time car-seat tantrum that ended with the child mysteriously whispering, “I need a helmet. I need a helmet.”
We can also add the fact that my children’s curtains have no rods.
We must add frequent conjecture about invertebrates, the sound of a staple gun, and five pounds of Italian cheese.
Then there’s my toenails, which I painted orange as an accent wall against the current gray of my interior: the next day my daughter whispered “orange toes” to some strangers, gamely, and pointed at my feet to inform them of this startling occurrence, this perhaps beautiful or at least exciting bright orangeness, in case they’d like to consider it, too.
Add that I yell at my children, that I fail.
Add it all, because there is no other way. There is no optimal life.
I’ll repeat this last phrase in a moment, but this time, it won’t feel unkind.
This time, you’ll read it in the company of an orange newt, which is lying on the floor of the forest in the rain, pausing in its crescent flail —sodden, improbably capable, and free:
There is no optimal life.