We Get a Freebie

Some Thoughts on New Year's Resolutions

I am absurdly responsible about recycling—I rinse out containers; separate PET from other plastics; sort glass by color; package paper in tidy piles; remove labels, staples, and plastic bits from items before putting them in the appropriate bins; schlep over to the electronics store to recycle batteries and lightbulbs; and avoid using plastic bags whenever possible—and on the rare occasions when I need one, I reuse the bag dozens of times before it finally performs its swan song cleaning up after my dog. However, there is one item that I unapologetically refuse to recycle: the peanut butter jar. After struggling to remove the sticky gunk by hand one too many times, and after discovering that if you put the jar in the dishwasher it will coat every dish with a greasy residue, I gave up. Into the trash it goes!

And since I’m in a confessional mood, here are a couple more shameful secrets. While health experts and censorious news stories warn that women are at increased risk of disease, death, and—worst of all—premature aging if we drink, I blithely enjoy my two glasses of white wine per day. Yes, every day, and I’m not sorry either. I am a vegetarian who almost never eats sugar or processed foods, and I hike up mountains for fun. My one deviation from health perfection ought to be allowed. Still with me? Ok, how about this: When my kids were little, and flying in the face of multiple articles in every issue of Parents Magazine,¹ I was not vigilant about sunscreen. As in, more often than not my kids went outside with only a single slimy swipe, if even that.

Experts in health, parenting, careers, morality, homemaking, and the like urge us to optimize ourselves and to strive for perfection, especially around New Year’s Day. But our lives are challenging enough as it is, and so sometimes we half-ass it, we take a mulligan, we let things slide, we deploy our Get Out of Jail Free card, we cut ourselves some slack, or, as I like to put it, we get a freebie. Instead of feeling guilty about our failures and making resolutions to fix ourselves, we will be happier if we acknowledge reality and embrace our freebies.

I wholeheartedly agree! Cartoon by Roz Chast, from the New Yorker.

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Friends’ Freebies

Many years ago, my cousin wanted to get a dog. Because she had a baby, a toddler, and a preschooler at home, she decided that a rescue dog—which could be fearful or aggressive—wouldn’t be a good fit for her family, and so she went to a responsible breeder. Makes sense, right? Wrong. Her friends gave her a terrible scolding when she shared pictures of her new dog online. As it happens, I have a dog in this fight. While most of my dogs have been rescues, when my kids were little we got our beloved basset hound from a responsible breeder, because it was easier for me and safer for my kids to have a dog we knew would be family-friendly. And while my current rescue dog, Lynn,² is an absolute treasure and ridiculously smart and cute, far be it from me to demand that people get a rescue dog or else nothing. Make the right decision for your family, and please don’t deny yourselves the joy of a dog for political reasons!

Honesty compels me to admit that the real motivation for including these photos is to show off how adorable Lynn is.

And speaking of politics, we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of entertainment for political reasons either. As my daughter says, “I enjoy classic literature knowing that it often has a lot of prejudice—especially Oliver Twist.” My friend Franziska agrees: “I enjoy old sketches and jokes from the seventies, though they are often not politically correct.” Me too, Franziska, me too! For example, we are both huge fans of Fawlty Towers, including this justly famous sketch:³

Thankfully, it has become more acceptable to take a freebie in our housekeeping. I hope the following examples that friends have kindly allowed me to share here will inspire us all to be less hard on ourselves, and more willing to take a freebie if we need one.

I don’t empty a candle of remaining wax once the wick is down. Sometimes it’s a LOT of leftover wax. I know it’s terrible to not save it. I could recraft it into a new candle. I could light a city with the leftovers. Oh well.

I tell everyone that the robot vacuum does daily vacuuming and I do a deep clean on the weekends, but this is a lie. If the robot didn’t vacuum it, it ain’t getting vacuumed. Also, I bought a $500 robot so I wouldn’t have to vacuum.

I don’t project-manage in the home. That is, I don’t make myself mentally or emotionally responsible for whether household tasks get done or not. I either do them, or don’t do them. . . . The result of this, obviously, is that our house is much less tidy and well-maintained than it would otherwise have been, but I don’t think I could ever make myself not heartily loathe the process of telling other people what to do, so that’s the way it’s gonna be.

Aside from cooking, baking, cleaning, and walking our dogs, we hire out for everything else. I grew up watching my parents “waste” their weekends away fixing cars, home improvement stuff, yard work, etc. It’s ok if you like that stuff, but they didn’t and it was such a drain on them.

I have never, ever, in my entire life cleaned an oven.

A few more. Readers, can we find it in our hearts to forgive these miscreants their trespasses?

If I just really need to get through the day—I’m sick or need to study or whatever—I let the kids have unlimited TV time.

I don’t brush my teeth twice a day or floss daily ([I brush] once a day and floss when I remember, which is like every other day or so). But, I tell my dentist that I do.⁴

At the supermarket, if I realize I don’t need something, I just stick it surreptitiously back on the nearest shelf instead of putting it properly back. (Unless it’s cold storage, of course—I’m not an animal.)

The Sleeper Freebie

Anyway, what if the experts who scold us about our freebies are wrong? What if the perfection they’re pushing us toward is in fact harmful, and our freebies turn out to be the right thing to do after all? This clip from the Woody Allen film Sleeper was intended as a joke but has ironically aged well; we now know that fat, steak, and chocolate are indeed healthy and good.

I admit to feeling smug about this one. I love full-fat dairy products, and during the nineties, when the media ratcheted up panic about fat, I refused the Lenten miseries of skim milk, margarine, and sugary 100-calorie Snackwells snack packs and carried on chowing down on whole milk, butter, and cheese. And was vindicated.

Sometimes our freebies turn out to be better not only for us but for other people too. For example, the friend who doesn’t project-manage in her home is teaching her kids to be responsible and avoiding a source of family conflict to boot. The friend who hires workers to perform tasks she doesn’t enjoy is supporting local businesses and sharing quality time with her husband. And while the mom-police might slap my wrist for being lax with sunscreen, they don’t know what I know: My kids hated sunscreen so much that when I’d come at them with the bottle, they’d say, “Oh well, I’ll just stay inside.” I decided that it would be better for them to go out and play in the fresh air than to sit around in their rooms, even at the cost of a bit of exposure to UV rays.

In fact, our kids often prefer our freebies to perfect virtue, as my friend Suki discovered:

During a particularly busy week at work and feeling exhausted, I made peanut-butter sandwiches three nights in a row for dinner. I felt immense guilt for not making a nutritious hot meal for my kids. On the third night, my then five-year-old son announced during our peanut-butter-sandwich dinner, “You are the BEST mommy in the whole world for making a delicious dinner!”

Other People Get a Freebie Too

Here’s a spiritual practice we can all try: When we see someone doing something we don’t approve of, instead of informing them of how wrong they are, let’s think of it as their freebie. When I mentioned on Facebook that I throw away the peanut butter jar, a few well-meaning friends rushed to suggest ways I could do better, even going so far as to recommend a product I could order on Amazon for the sole purpose of scraping the jar clean. (Only one suggestion—give the jar to the dog⁵ —sounded like any fun at all.) It’s true that my friends were trying to be helpful, but all told I already spend close to an hour a week dealing with recycling (Swiss recycling rules are not for sissies!), and I would prefer not to spend one minute more. Harumph. We all have our own examples of freebies we wish our loved ones would accept. So let’s accept them!

We can take this principle even further. When we mess up, we would rather our loved ones give us a freebie instead of berating us, right? Case in point, one winter morning, when my kids were a baby and a preschooler, I packed them into the car and drove to our synagogue for Sunday school. I parked, my son and I climbed out of the car, I hit the lock button, tossed my purse into the car, and slammed the door shut. Ruh roh. (Don’t ask me why I did such a boneheaded thing. I have no earthly clue.) A friend stood by the car while I went into the office to call my husband: “I locked Casey in the car. I know it was stupid. Don’t give me a hard time. Just come with the key.” And, to his credit, my husband did what I asked. I try to remember this story when people in my life make mistakes.⁶ When we are patient about others’ mistakes, we grant them the same understanding we’d like for ourselves, after all.

I found this image here.

Huh. I seem to have talked myself around to endorsing New Year’s resolutions, just not the typical ones. Instead of resolving to be stricter with ourselves as we strive for moral and physical perfection, let’s resolve to show a bit of grace for the imperfections of others. Or we could always take the attitude of my online friend Buck Mulligan,⁷ who doesn’t make New Year’s resolutions because “What if you’ve already reached perfection?”

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How about you, readers? What are some ways you are less than perfect? What are your freebies? Please share your thoughts in the comments so we can celebrate them with you!

The Tidbit

We humans aren’t the only ones who fail to live up to expectations and fall short of perfection. I would add to this list of fruits that don’t live up to their names the following malingerers: kiwifruit, dewberry, and—luckily!—chokecherry.

1. I suspect that the magazines tell us to use up an entire bottle of sunscreen every day at the behest of advertisers, who want to sell more product.

2. Lynn’s name cracks me up, but we can’t take credit; we adopted her through a Czech group, which named her. Czechs like to give dogs American names. In our Prague neighborhood there were dogs named Ron, Jerry, and Bettina, for example.

3. If this video (“Don’t Mention the War,” which culminates in Basil Fawlty goose-stepping around the hotel lobby and shouting in a bad German accent) is unavailable when you see this post, it’s because it keeps getting taken down. YouTube apparently thinks it is too offensive for us to watch.

4. I once read that 50 percent of Americans floss every day. That statistic seemed so preposterous to me (I doubt it’s even 5 percent, let alone 50), that I asked my dentist what he thought. He just laughed and said, “Not even close!”

5. Lynn would be more than happy to volunteer for this task, but alas her snout is too short. Besides, then I would just have to clean the peanut butter off of her, an even less-appetizing prospect than cleaning it out of the jar.

6. Sometimes I fall short. The other day Casey left her wallet behind on the counter at an airport Starbucks, never to be seen again, and got an earful from me. I’m sorry, Casey, and while I hope there won’t be a next time, if there is I promise not to give you another lecture!

7. Yes, this is a pseudonym. Do you suppose that he is stately and plump?