Adina’s Cute & Perky Blog!

I hated her in the worst way. She was my fourth grade science teacher.

She got on to this one boy about picking his nose, and I am sure he is still not over it to this day! It was traumatic, y’all. I swear it was.

But that wasn’t the reason I hated her.

No. It went far deeper than that boy’s finger.

She would not give one hundreds. No matter how good your paper was, you got a ninety-nine. A big, red ninety-nine in a big red circle.

To a shy fourth grader, this was nonsense. Utter madness.

No matter how hard you studied, you could not break the magical ceiling of ninety-nine.

She was old. I’m sure she taught for fifty years.

You could beg, you could plead, you could flick a booger on her, but the reply was always the same, ‘Nobody is perfect. There are no perfect papers. If I had time to look, I’m sure I could find something wrong. An ‘I’ not dotted. A ‘T’ not crossed. Nobody is perfect. Only Jesus.”

Now how do you argue with that? She played the Jesus card. As our teacher she already held a hand full of aces, but she had to go and say that.

As a fourth grader in the Bible Belt of America, that argument could stop a girl cold, y’all! I ain’t even playing!

Oh, it was a good lesson…the whole concept that nobody is perfect.

But it was a lesson I was not ready to learn in fourth grade science class.

It would be a few years later before I would be ready for that one…or, well maybe a few decades later!!

And it would be that damned one hundred again. Only this time the one hundred in question was how much I needed to lose, and Mrs. Hudson had no control over it. I held all the cards, even the Jesus one!

It was a daunting number to face.

So I made a plan to lose it over the course of a year. Ten pounds a month. That sounded reasonable to me.

Right?

But often what sounds reasonable is not exactly feasible. And for me to lose that much in a year just wasn’t.

I made a chart.

I drew one hundred empty circles.

I thought it would be fun to color one in every time I lost a pound.

But I made no plan for when perfection was not reached.

I made ten pounds the first month plus some.

The second month I barely scraped by, and that was only because the two months together made twenty.

And I wasn’t ready for that third month when perfection was not achieved.

I recalculated what I would have to do to make it in a year.

For some reason that was important to me.

But attempt after attempt failed because I refused to face the inevitable.

I cannot lose one hundred pounds in a year.

When I decided to try one more time, I made no charts, no graphs, no time frame plan of any kind.

I decided that at least getting a few poundsoff was better than none. Believe it or not, I had no ultimate goal. I just wanted to get under 200 pounds and at least make it to a size sixteen.

And it’s amazing what can happen when you let go of perfection.

Although I had not made a chart full of little circles, I was making a life full of them. Coloring them in one circle at a time.

It took me two years to lose, and a lot can happen in two years.

If I had kept that chart, I would have colored in so much more than numbers.

I would have colored in circles for facing my fear of the gym, letting go of what hurts me, jogging a mile without stopping, entering a 5K race….

And you know what?

There were WAY more than a hundred circles to fill. I needed more than a year. I had a lot to work on.

Although the numbers seemed to portray that I could do it in a year, the life lessons did not.

I learned one of the biggest lessons while stuck at 203 pounds for three months. No circles colored for pounds lost, but certainly circles colored for sticking it out no matter what and willpower!

And in the end, Mrs. Hudson was right.

Nobody is perfect.

Whether we set out with a goal to compete, lose, write, race, make a film….whatever it is, the journey there will not be perfect.

But if the journey was always perfect, no life lessons would be learned…and that boy would still be picking his nose. And I’m glad he doesn’t pick his nose, y’all. No one really needs to do that. Not in public, anyway.

God rest Mrs. Hudson’s non-perfect soul!