The Big Day

I'm alive.

Let me tell you, one of the worst things about living in Montana is the distance between, well, anything really.

We've been driving 60 miles round trip the entire week so Jackson could attend play practice for his home school theater group. (Hear my martyr cry?) Do that with a baby and a big writing deadline hovering over you and road construction and a child who is certain he isn't going to survive the fact that you signed him up for said theater group in the first place.

The week wasn't without its glitches. Four hours of play practice a day is enough to send any young thespian swinging from the stage curtains. Jackson nearly died in the first practice, and to make a long story short, that day ended with us having him write "I will do good things" 50 times when we got home.

The next day, he didn't try a fraction of the crap he pulled on the "good things" day. I considered it a triumph, and he learned that the directors were actually nice people when you paid attention to them.

Today was the big performance. Jackson was a little nervous. He'd been working so hard on good behavior that he hadn't entirely registered that he was actually going to be showing his act to an auditorium full of eager parents and bored siblings today. Reality hit when the directors tried to usher the youngest children into their costumes for the dress rehearsal.

Several minutes after Jackson's age group departed, I started seeing his peers come back dressed for the show. My little pumpkin came trailing behind his group, in the same clothes he'd worn to the theater, with tears dangerously close to running down his face. Turns out, throwing a child who prides himself on modesty into a room full of people he's known for exactly four days and telling him to strip down and put on a strange outfit will throw him off a little.

He wouldn't even come out to do the dress rehearsal after that. As far as he was concerned, the stunt the directors had just pulled meant he was done.

I immediately panicked and fortunately found the right mixture of praise, coaxing, threats, and bribery to get him dressed and participating in the second run-through of the play. I was on the edge of an anxiety-induced mommy meltdown migraine by this evening when the play took place. Oh, I wanted my little one to be perfect. I was afraid of what the crowd might think, what Jackson's directors might think, and what he might do on stage if he got upset again.

And yet again, the things I worried about didn't matter. Jackson wasn't perfect up there, but somehow to my dumb surprise, none of the other kids did everything right either. My little one belted out his line, and got the best laugh from the crowd out of anyone in his group (It's true.) I realized I've been expecting too much from him this week: perfection. How did I expect my six-year-old to give something I'm not capable of?

The best lesson I learned from a silly school play is that imperfection can be pretty perfect as long as we're learning along the way.