Stop looking for the perfect one
Stop looking for the perfect one
Episode 6: There Isn't a Perfect One
There are stretches of road in north central Ohio that are mostly fields. Highways only in the sense that they're paved and have a yellow line down the middle. Several years ago I drove my youngest son along those roads to look at a college a soccer coach had invited him to visit. He was asleep within fifteen minutes and stayed that way for most of two hours, and I drove and looked at cornfields and thought about how, if a tornado came up off the horizon, nothing in any direction was going to slow it down. When people asked me later what I thought of the school, that's the first thing I told them.
Mike is the kid who never met a silence he didn't fill. He once talked through an entire night at my parents' house when he was three. So when he went quiet on the drive home, that was news. And then he asked the one thing all that talking had never answered: how was he supposed to choose? I told him the truth. There isn't a perfect one. There are hundreds of schools where he'd be happy, and the kid who's happy four years from now isn't the one who cracked some code. He's the one who picked a good one, showed up, and made it right after he got there. I could say that with a straight face because I once got it completely wrong myself.
In this episode:
The campus tour flex about the nearest Walmart being miles away, and the mom question I kept asking instead
What I told him in the car: pick a good one, go there, be yourself
The school I chose at eighteen, the mono, the panic attack on the drive back, and my mom turning the car around
How I made my choice right by leaving, and how he made his right by staying. Opposite moves, same lesson.
The hard phone call he made to the coach at the school he turned down, and what those two did after every game for four years
The small wrong choices and the big ones, and the only version of failure that actually counts
What I tell women who are stressed about their kids' choices but are really worried about their own
"There is no failure in the choice. There's only failure if you refuse to learn from the wrong choice."
Near the end of this episode I say the same thing to women that I said to my son in the car: figure out what you actually want, then look honestly at the choices getting you there or holding you back. If you want a place to work that out on paper, the But How Are You Really? workbook walks you through it. It's $47 and it's here.
Follow Honestly Kristin on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so new episodes come to you. And if this one sounded like the drive you're about to take, send it to the friend dropping a kid off this fall.
