Imperfectly Perfect
How seemingly imperfect halves create a pefect whole
by Carey Mednick, posted on January 24th, 2010 in The Love Issue
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One gallon of tartar sauce? Check. 48-pack of deodorant? Check.
As the Mednick family winds its way through the cavernous warehouse club store, piling ginormous find upon ginormous find into our cart, our fearless leader (a.k.a. my husband, Scott) is a dead man walking, uttering, “Not enough room in the car … not enough room in the car.” I cheerfully counter with, “It’ll fit … it’ll fit.” In the meantime, our son, Ian, ignores our conversation and is instead intrigued by a Swiffer bulk pack.
Close to $250 later, I buckle Ian into his car seat while Scott arranges our purchases with the precision of a bomb diffuser in the trunk of our mini SUV. He decrees his mission accomplished with a satisfying thump of the door closing.“Now if YOU had loaded the car, it wouldn’t have fit,” he says smugly settling into the back seat beside Ian. (My front passenger seat hasn’t cradled a passenger other than the diaper bag and assorted fast food and toddler snack detritus since Ian’s birth.)
At first, I’m slightly annoyed but I ponder this statement for a moment and know he’s absolutely right. It’s just another way our marriage works.
On paper, Scott and I are complete opposites. He’s a calm, logical civil engineer and I’m a slightly hyper, extremely quirky writer. He works with numbers and facts. I work with feelings and metaphors and pretty words. He has the patience of a saint. I have the patience of a Saint Bernard puppy. His world is black or white. Mine is a million shades of grey.
We met on a blind date and the conversation—given our differences—came surprisingly easy. But a comparison of our CD collections belied our chemistry. Mine reflected the taste of a pimply-faced adolescent boy, his, a woman well past her child-bearing years. Despite our lack of common musical ground, our relationship fell into a groove over the next few months. We learned that we shared a love of animals, new adventures and a live-and-let-live outlook on life that went deeper than any Celine Dion CD. We also realized that when we put our best qualities together, we make one slightly imperfect whole.
A product of that slightly imperfect whole is Ian. At 21 months, he’s the spitting image of his dad, or mom, depending on the observer, the lighting and the phase of the moon. Personality-wise, he’s a bit of both. Like me, Ian has a clear love of reading … a fact I silently cheer every time he settles into my lap for a story. (Scott’s idea of a good read is poring over the owner’s manual of his latest gadget purchase.) Like Scott, Ian appreciates anything mechanical—especially with wheels. (The only wheels I really think are cool are the ones attached to a dessert cart.)
Every time Ian closely examines a toy to discover how it works (that’s all Scott) or squeezes his face into a cartoonish expression (that’s all me), we see all of the ways our relationship succeeds … and that’s imperfectly perfect for us.
