And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.
—John Steinbeck
No person has a perfect track record. Certainly no parent does. We all mess up. We all fall short. We make mistakes. We lose our temper and our patience. We handle certain situations in ways we wish we hadn’t.
Is there anything worse than that feeling? Knowing that you screwed up? That you might have hurt them? Shane Parrish, creator of the wildly popular Farnam Street blog, explained: I remember calling my late mom one night, exhausted and feeling overwhelmed. I had lost my cool on the kids. She gave me a piece of advice that stuck with me, “If you don’t learn to let go of your mistakes today, they’ll compound tomorrow. Get some sleep and start again tomorrow.” I still remember that when I have bad parenting days. Tomorrow I’ve got to get up and start all over.
You can’t go back and undo what you did yesterday. You can’t erase from their memories that time you lost your cool or that time you said those regrettable things. But what you can do is make this just one memory among many greater, more positive ones. What you can do is show them that this one moment isn’t who you are. You can strive to get better.
Keep your head up. Step up. Try again tomorrow.