Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Facing down the enemy

I made a huge pot of chicken and rice for dinner and the whole thing is gone. Now I don't know whether to be happy I finally cooked something everybody liked, or annoyed because there aren't any leftovers. It's a conundrum.

On the bright side, I finally took my kids to the dentist today for the first time in seven years. That's right. Seven years. Once again, I lose my Mother of the Year award. It's the perfect example of one of my three birth defects, perfectionism.

When we moved here, I couldn't decided on a dentist for the kids. They had a perfectly wonderful pediatric dentist, Dr. Bogert, who'd been their faithful oral caregiver since Zach was four. It was traumatic enough that we lost their pediatrician who'd taken care of all my kids since Zach was a year old, I couldn't bring myself to trust my children to just any old dentist. So I procrastinated for seven years.

It could have been permanent procrastination, except that Katie is such a persistent little cud when she wants something. And she wants braces.

So, about two months ago I bit the bullet and tracked down a dentist in Conroe who's on the kids' insurance plan. I was not overly impressed by our initial visit. It's in an older residential house in a semi-commercialized neighborhood, but it was clean and the guy let all of us pile into one room while he checked everybody's x-rays and gave their mouths a once-over. I wanted all the kids to be able to be seen at the same time, so it took this long to get them in for their cleanings. It went well. And when we left, I had an epiphany. I realized that even if this dentist is not the end-all-be-all of the world, my kids had clean teeth, and that's ok.

As the old Russian proverb goes: Perfectionism is the enemy of good enough.

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