The Things Your Mother Talked You Out Of

How being steered away from "average" in childhood shapes adult perfectionism, and why it's time to finally let yourself be a beginner.

Plenty of women can name the activity their mother steered them away from as a teenager. The reasons given at the time were practical ones, the club volleyball fees were $1,400 a season, the drama program met three nights a week and grades would slip, the other girls in the youth orchestra had been playing since they were five. Some of those reasons were true. Looking back over the full list of yeses and nos, a lot of these women see that everything that got turned down had one feature in common, the girl might have turned out ordinary at it.

A mother who wouldn't pay $300 for a summer pottery course would pay $85 an hour for a chemistry tutor. Her daughter was already near the top of the chemistry class, and the tutor was there to keep her there. She drove forty minutes each way to math competitions and wouldn't drive ten to a community theater audition. The girl who swam well got private coaching. When she asked to try out for the school soccer team as a sophomore, she was told it was too late to start, the other girls had years on her, she'd spend the whole season on the bench. The money and the driving went toward whatever the daughter was already good at, and anything she was new at, where she'd have been average or worse for a year or two, didn't get started.

The Fear of the Sideline

Mothers get measured by how their children turn out, by other mothers, by grandparents, by whoever is standing next to them at pickup. A mother who already feels behind the woman down the street, whose son made the regional orchestra and whose daughter got the scholarship, has a strong reason to make sure her own child doesn't come in last at anything people can see. The mothers most likely to steer this way are the ones who resented the comparison. They believed the other family had money or connections or luck it hadn't earned, and they decided their own child at least wouldn't be the one doing worse.

A child who's average at soccer is on display every Saturday in front of the same parents on the sideline. Turning down soccer kept the daughter from being bad at something in public, and it kept her mother from standing on that sideline watching it happen while the other mothers watched with her. Most of the mothers who did this wouldn't describe it that way. Plenty of them believed they were sparing their daughter a humiliation, which was part of what they were doing.

The Adult Cost of Never Being a Beginner

A woman raised this way picks the college major she was strongest in at seventeen. At thirty-eight she still hasn't signed up for a single class she couldn't pass on the first day. She'll pay $240 for an eight-week beginner dance class and stop going after week two because the woman next to her picked up the steps faster. She'll tell people she isn't a sporty person, or isn't creative, or can't sing. The evidence for each of those is a decision someone else made for her when she was fourteen, before she'd had a single season to find out.

When "Support" Leaves a Mark

For a daughter who has stopped speaking to her mother, or is thinking about it, this kind of steering is hard to point to, because nothing on the list looks like mistreatment. Her mother paid for tutors, drove to competitions, sat through every swim meet. When the daughter tries to explain what was wrong, her examples sound like complaints about a mother who spent a lot of money on her. The problem is in which parts of her got paid for.

She was backed for being good at something, and anything she might have been mediocre at was shut down before she could learn whether she liked it.

She spent her childhood being encouraged and came out of it believing she had to be good at something already to be allowed to try it.

Permission to Be Mediocre

If any of this is familiar, write down what you were talked out of between twelve and eighteen, the activity and the reason you were given. Then write down what your mother said yes to and roughly what she spent on it. If every yes went to something you were already near the top in, you're looking at the pattern. You're an adult with your own money now, so pick one activity from the first list and sign up for the beginner class. Go to all eight weeks, knowing you'll be one of the worst people there for most of them.

Further Reading

If you find yourself constantly battling perfectionism, fearing the beginner stage, or realizing you were valued more for your performance than for who you are, understanding where that training started is the first step to untangling it.

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