Invisible Necessity
Great waiters and great referees have a lot in common. Both are at their best when you don’t notice that they’re there. It’s ironic, really. Their presence is essential and yet, they only make things better when they don’t get in the way.
Bastions of invisible necessity. Not the life goal a lot of people have taped to the front of their fridge.
Great waiters and great referees have a lot in common. Both are at their best when you don’t notice that they’re there. It’s ironic, really. Their presence is essential and yet, they only make things better when they don’t get in the way.
In 1953, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, coined the term “good enough mother”. His studies of thousands of babies and their mothers revealed that children actually benefit when their mothers fail them in manageable ways. Certainly not inferring neglect or abuse, but in moderate ways, like not being first in the carpool line or forgetting to make snacks for the holiday party on the last Friday before Christmas break. Dropping a ball now and then, it seems, is advantageous. (I wonder if my children realize how fortunate they were!) Imperfection, as it turns out, is a fertile bed for progress. The grappling through frustration and tight spaces is where little people grow their wings.
But nobody writes that on their hand while they’re pregnant. ‘Good Enough.’ That’s just not something that about-to-be mothers ever aspire to become.
I remember the pull as a parent to don the white coat and go running when one or the other of my children lay lacerated on the shards of a broken heart. Every cell in my body lined up like the crew at Seattle Grace waiting for the ambulance to pull in. I wanted to stop the bleeding. Patch them up. Make them as good, if not better than, the way they were before. The Mighty Mouse inside me would be screaming, “Here I come to save the day!” And yet, what their open wounds needed less than anything was me in the middle of the mix. The best thing a parent can do sometimes is pull up a chair on the sidelines and hang out--like a spotter with her hands up, always ready, but just outside of the fray.
The ‘too good’ mother wants to solve the problem. The bad one doesn’t know there is one.
Just enough is a hard line to land on no matter what you do.
We went to dinner last week at one of our Oklahoma City sweet spots, a place called Michael’s Grill. It’s one of those restaurants locals don’t tell people about because they always want to be able to get in. (Though you can’t if you don’t have a reservation: do not even try.) If Rao’s in New York City was balled up and plopped down in a strip mall in Oklahoma City—minus the mob, of course-- Michael’s Grill is what it would be called. At Michael’s, the regulars have ‘their tables’, sort of like churchgoers have their pews. The atmosphere is easy, but alive, and the food is vintage Italian, yet unique. The owner, a graying guy in a charisma laced apron (you guessed it, a guy named Michael) kisses every girl on the cheek and calls every guest by name. It’s where I go when I want to float for a while in another place and time.
But I digress.
We had an amazing dinner there last week. As usual. The old school carbonara… the bread,….the crab cakes…the Caesar salad with always just enough lemon in the mix…were each prepared to perfection, with the courses arriving like the cars of a train. Perfectly spaced, never rushed or lagging. The meal and thus our conversation never skipped a beat. I don’t recall my water glass ever being empty or a dish ever needing to be cleared. And though we somehow were short changed a knife in the transition of the courses, one appeared before we ever even needed it to cut. We rolled seamlessly without interruption from order to dinner to check. However, I couldn’t pick our waiter out of a line up if Tom Brady’s net worth was on the line.
Sometimes the most dazzling people are the ones dancing around the sides of the show.
Sometimes the most dazzling people are the ones dancing around the sides of the show.
Unfortunately, however, not many excel there. Because it’s hard. What people are often really good at, instead, is getting too much in the way. In our own and in each other’s and in the middle of the very things that we want most to be so good. It’s fuzzy inside our ‘want to’. Sometimes it’s tough to see exactly where to be.
And it happens everywhere—this inability to be sort of ghost-like while balancing on the beam--with parents and their little leaguers, with leaders and their staffs, with coaches and their teams. The middle draws us to it and before we know it, we go from aiders to abettors, like the breeze to damaging wind.
Touch-and-go guidance requires restraint. And situational awareness. And humility in dosages you don’t find at every turn. However, can you imagine the mayhem on a football field if there weren’t any striped shirts blowing whistles or throwing flags or setting the ball down and winding their arm to tell everybody to get ready to go? The game would be mass chaos and nobody would watch or care or come.
Invisible necessities make the world work, giving credence to the adage that the best things in life are very often those you cannot see. And they never receive enough credit for what they didn’t do.
Sherri Coale
P.S. Hats off to the world’s best fictional waitress. Thank you, Carol, for making Melvin want to be a better man.