Down on Ourselves

Why is it theat even when we do something well enough - if we believe in our minds that it is 'not good enough'; we get down on ourselves.

The scenario is as follows:

I have wanted to cook a whole fish for quite some time. So I decided a few weeks back that I would just do it and picked today as the day. So I went out and bought the fish and all the otehr ingredients and then I spent an hour this evening preparing and baking the fish.

In the mean time I made dinner for action man - spinach and ricotta gnocchi and pumpkin pasta sauce.

The first hint of trouble came with the gluggy overcooked gnocchi - I left it in the water for too long and the texture wasn't very good. action man agrees and ate one piece and then started throwing the rest on the floor.

Then came the fish. It looked fine, it smelt fine, it even tasted fine but there were scales and bones in every tiny mouthful - from a scaled fish that I had thoroughly checked for scale before cooking it! The accompanying vegetables were overcooked and difficult to eat - I had followed the recipie to a tea.

Then I looked at the mess from the dinner preparation, the mess on the child, the mess on the floor, thought about how little the child had eaten, listened to the child screaming because he didn't like the dinner I had provided him and wanted out of his chair

and then I began beating myself up for the failure that was dinner on all counts - I had failed to feed my hungry family, I had made a huge mess that I now had to clean up and I would face a crying baby at 5am because he would be hungry.

The thing is - both the dinners - both ours and the baby's - were fine and of good quality. They were both entirely edible and not a failure on my part at all. It was simply the amount of scales and bones in the fish and a grumpy baby that made it all seem a lot worse than it really was.

I find that I beat up on myself like this for 'failing' in many circumstances - I am very bad at looking at what I did achieve and congratulating myself on the effort I put in.

If I run 5km I think - that was so bad I could barely make 5km.

If I clean the whole house but don't get a chance to mop the floors - I didn't do a good enough job.

I really must learn the art of being kinder to myself!