New Year's Goals and an Imperfect Mary

New Year's Goals and an Imperfect Mary

When I was a girl, we had a crib with all the Christmas story figurines. One of the shepherds had a lamb propped over his neck, like a woolen scarf. Two angels were propped up on top of the crib and a large silver star hung at the peak of the open creche. My father used to 'hide' the baby Jesus up high in the cabinet and surreptitiously place it in the manger before we got out of bed on Christmas morning. Over the years, with seven children playing with the ceramic figurines, they naturally got chipped and broken and lost. Some of the figures were so damaged with chunks of plaster gone so that we could see the wires at the centre of the figure. Eventually, the entire set dwindled down to only one sheep, one shepherd, one cow, two of the three wise men, one angel and of course Joseph, Mary and Jesus. But one year, we could not find Mary. I suppose she just couldn't sustain the wear and tear of our household. Baby Jesus still arrived on cue but it just wasn't the same without Mary.

The following Christmas, the creche was set up again but this time my mother had found a 'spare Mary' to complete the Christmas scene. However, because Mary had been scrounged from elsewhere and was not an original member of the set, she was quite a bit larger than the other figurines. In fact, Mary on her knees still managed to tower over Joseph who happened to be in a standing position. At the time, we were simply glad to have Mary back and it made no difference to us that she didn't 'match' the set.

Now, in retrospect, I am so grateful to have grown up in a family where things didn't match, where china was often chipped or cracked, where stairs creaked and windows rattled and where the gooseberry bushes overran the garden. I think our generation is obsessed with perfection. We want the best of everything. Few of us would glue up a broken figurine or replace a broken clasp on a bra or take apart a toaster to attempt to fix it. When we paint a room, we want things to match. There's even a name for these small items we place in the newly painted room: accents. When did 'accents' become something that everyday people had to worry themselves about? Personally, I love beautiful things. I am an artist, after all and aesthetics mean a lot to me. But do I love perfection too much? Is there some wisdom in the way I was raised? Where perfection was an ideal only to aspire to only in terms of developing character traits such as kindness and 'doing the right thing'.


This new year, I am going to sit down and write out my goals, as I always do. It's fun to think about what this next year might bring. But I am also going to include something different in my goals. That is, I'm going to include a “make-do” attitude. In certain areas in my life, I am going to be okay with imperfection. Not only am I going to be okay with it, I'm going to celebrate it. Why not? It's going to be a 'yes' kind of year: yes to hope, yes to kindness and yes to living in this imperfect world.