The Perfect Decision

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Decisions have terrified me. Part fear of missing out, part I don’t know what the heck I’m doing, part what if I make the wrong choice…I would try to look at each decision and see all the possible outcomes, feel out all the consequences and come to a decision that feels right. This takes me ages. I can hardly keep up with the pace of the decisions I need to make for myself…never mind the thousands and thousands (millions?) I’m going to need to make for my children. I know I’m doomed to a life of struggle if I don’t change the way I see and make decisions. I don’t know if you feel the same way, but I bet many people would list decision making in the stressful rather than fun category.

Here’s what I think could be the secret key: what if you could never make a decision that’s wrong? What if no matter which choice you made, in any situation, it was always the right one? And what if every consequence that followed was also the perfect one for that situation? You might call me crazy, but I think this is entirely possible.

I’ve been a mother for a year and 9 days. Although I’ve been thinking about and planning for this time in my life for many years, I still only have a year and 9 days of experience. And in this first year, I haven’t had to make any big decisions. I’ve done a good job making some of the little decisions seem big – I researched organic mattresses for way too many hours and spent ages figuring out how to make my own baby food. There were some mid sized decisions to make – how to get our little one to sleep more than two straight hours at night without breaking all our hearts with a lot of crying. But we haven’t come to any fork in road kind of decisions – the kind of big decisions where you feel that making a choice heads you down one path instead of another, opens some doors and closes others.

These are the kinds of choices that are so hard to make – which voice do we listen to, logic or our heart? Our friends’ ideas or our parent’s advice? Things we read about or suggestions from our doctors? Do we think short term or long term of how this will affect our children’s happiness? There’s so much pressure for it to be the right decision – to not mess it up or we might mess up our kids.

What if you imagined for a moment that every decision you made for your children (and yourself) was the right one? That means that no matter what it looks like on the surface, whatever consequences come along with it are perfect. This can be true if you look at the result of each situation as an opportunity for you and your children to learn, discover and grow. That would mean there are no bad decisions because each decision, regardless of it’s appearance, would lead you to another opportunity to choose who you want to be. We can learn just as much (if not more) from experiences we decide we don’t prefer as those that are peachy and easy.

So making perfect decisions would mean listening to whichever voice feels right to you in any given situation – trusting that it’s the right decision in that moment – and moving on. It means telling doubt and worry that they can take a vacation – to a tropical island far, far away – and come back a bit more mellow and less overworked, maybe with a tan and a Hawaiian shirt. This doesn’t mean you can’t have concerns, or course correct as you go along – if something is not working for you or your family, you make a new decision to adjust. But that doesn’t make that previous decision a bad one – it was an opportunity to see things a bit differently and say this is who we want to be, as individuals or as a family.

You might be familiar with the feeling of seeing other people’s decisions and realizing that those are not the choices you want to make. We often experience choices our parents made that we don’t want to repeat (and others we want to emulate). We can choose to see this as things they did wrong or as a way to craft who we want to be out of all the possibilities. We can even be thankful – if they didn’t give us a chance to see who we don’t want to be, how would we be able to see who we do want to be? So make sure you give yourself that same thankfulness. Every day you wake up a new person, knowing all kinds of new things that you didn’t know yesterday – that’s just how life works. So while you might make a different decision tomorrow, the one you make today is perfect and will lead you to right where you need to be tomorrow.

Much love, Katie

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You can find more of Katie’s beautiful word at her site With a Love Like That