All of my life I’ve been an overachiever. I was the child who wanted to try everything, and wouldn’t settle for being “good” at anything. I wanted to be the best. I had to be the best.

I married when I was twenty, to a man who didn’t love me but insisted that he did and would forever. Within a year he insisted that he didn’t, and never had. By this time, I was ten weeks pregnant. With twins.

To say I was depressed would be a massive understatement. He left and I wandered; through my home, through church after church, through doctors appointments. Waiting and hoping and searching for something that would make it all okay.

It didn’t come. The answer didn’t magically appear out of the sky. I reflected on my life and didn’t find any wisdom or peace or solace. I just found myself alone, with my stomach swelling and my fear growing. I literally had no idea what I would do, how I would live, how I could support myself and these two people I was growing.

I always thought being a mother was easy. Television had told me so most of my life and besides, almost everything had been in the past. If it wasn’t I tackled it with vigor and willed it to become easy, told myself it was easy.

Being pregnant and alone wasn’t easy.

The twins were due in May and arrived in March. The first day of spring, 1998. My daughter was a beautiful baby; small, delicate and sweet. True, she was tiny; much smaller than a baby should ever be. But she was glorious. She was perfect.

My son? Was a different story.

I had a c-section, a forced and painful affair, and my children were immediately whisked away. Out of sight. Out of reach. Later, as I laughed hysterically and proposed marriage to the Anesthesiologist (thanks to the massive amounts of painkillers pumped into my veins), the doctor brought me pictures of my little boy and my little girl. Two little Polaroid pictures that I still look at sometimes.

I looked at my son and asked, “Is he dead?”

Because frankly? He looked dead. He was purple and his tiny belly was swollen. He was small, not even as small as my daughter, but still small. He looked fragile and frail. He looked unnatural. He looked wrong. He looked…imperfect.

I was quickly assured that he was not dead, but that his lack of oxygen during the birth might cause some problems later in life. He might be blind or deaf, he might be slow, or he might be retarded.

I was twenty-two. My husband had unceremoniously dumped me for a thirty-year old woman he worked with who had a Billy Ray Cyrus mullet and inner-thigh tattoos. I had just given birth to an infant who looked like a science project gone horribly wrong. I was, markedly, not okay. In fact, I was merging dangerously into “Jerry Springer” territory.

But something inside of me, something I had never felt before, surged. Powerfully.

I drew myself up, as much as I could while recovering from a c-section, and said to the doctor that I didn’t care. That it would be fine. That he was my son, and no matter what, he was my son. I didn’t care what physical or mental imperfections he had. He was my son.

In time, my son and daughter came home and I quickly realized that my son hated me and wanted me dead. My daughter cooed and smiled and patiently waited at her turn for a bottle. My son screamed continually. He had acid reflux and was miserable. He didn’t want me to hold him or touch him or come near him. Looking at him was okay, but only when he felt like it. He didn’t let me know when he felt like it.

I was a failure. I failed at being a wife. I wasn’t good enough for my husband to want to keep around. Now, I was failing at being a mother. The thing that I was sure was so easy. The one thing I knew would be natural and not forced. The one place in my life I was sure I would not have to pretend or try, I was failing. Miserably.

One day, when my son was six months old, he was quietly laying in his crib. I assumed he was plotting my demise and trudged drearily over to him to see what was next. I was exhausted, overwhelmed and just plain sad and anticipated he would begin to wail the moment I came into his sight.

My son, the child that had screamed every time he had seen me for most of his life, looked up at me and smiled.

He soon started to like me and enjoyed when I held him or tickled him. He liked the songs I sang to him and seemed to try to watch me as I fumbled through all those nursery rhymes I had forgotten (incidentally? Jack and Jill going up the hill have NOTHING to do with the Itsy Bitsy Spider). When he was a year old and he went for a check-up and the doctor said he was pretty small for his age, but still, pretty average.

Average.

My daughter grew and thrived. Every day she became more self-assured and self-confident. She is now nearly ten years old and strong, confident and utterly hilarious. I admire her and am almost in awe of her most of the time. She is the person I wish I could be someday.

My son? Struggles.

School has been a challenge for him. In Kindergarten he had to have a tutor. As I shelled out thousands of dollars for his classes, I kicked myself inside. How could I have failed him this much as a mother? How could he struggle so much and be so far behind? What could I have done to make him better?
 
Yet again and again, every time he fell down or failed, he got back up and tried again. He refused to give up. It didn’t come easy for him, nothing ever did, but it didn’t matter. It never mattered.

While my daughter moves fluidly through life my son plods. My daughter is careful and cautious and never wants to make a mistake. My son is more concerned with trying than if he makes a mistake or not. 

“Mistakes are just another way to say you’re learning,” he told me one day, a wise old sage at the age of nine.

My son is average, in almost all things. He’s not quite as tall as the other boys his age, nor his sister who towers over him (and gently teases him about it, as siblings do). He will probably never be a star when it comes to Taekwondo or soccer. While I can someday see my daughter as the President of The Known World, it’s easier to imagine my son in a quieter role; an artist, definitely a father, a gentle man with a loving heart. He often asks me if I will love his future wife, even if she has children of her own when he meets her (reflection, of course, on our lives). I assure him over and over, I will. I will trust him. I will trust his judgment. I will trust the man he becomes.

It’s hard sometimes, to see one child flourish and the other struggle. It would be more difficult if one child did not so easily share her successes and the other let his failures overwhelm him. I am so grateful for these children I was given and everything they have taught me about being a human being.

I spent so many years of my life striving for perfection. I always wanted the huge white house with the picket fence, the perfect husband and the perfect kids. I wanted to be someone famous and for the whole world to know my name. That, to me, was the definition of success.

I’m thirty-two years old. I still don’t know what I will be when I grow up. I have a husband now, a wonderful one who loves my son and daughter as his own. We have a house; smaller than I would like and with no fence, but it’s our home and it’s full of laughter. If anyone knows my name it will be because I am their friend, not their idol.

And all of that is okay.

I wish someone had told me before I had children, just how very perfect being “average” could be.

Stephanie R. Snowe is not really a writer but she likes to play one on the internet. She and her husband Jason live in East Tennessee with her twin son and daughter and their really hairy dog-child named Ginger. Stephanie spends her days as an Environmental Specialist/Training Slave and devotes her nights to writing in her blog Jason for the Love of God teaching young girls how to not take any crap (as a volunteer for the Girl Scouts), plotting elaborate revenge fantasies involving angry monkeys trapped in boxes, and preparing boxed dinners and passing them off as homemade.