POSSUM HOLE DISORDER

I think every person is made up of both strengths and weaknesses. We take all kinds of tests to figure out if we’re sanguine or melancholic, introverted or extroverted, strategic or empathetic, blue or orange, quality time or acts of service. We love whatever test makes us feel like we can finally understand ourselves. I have taken them all. I think the chance to view something that I do naturally as something extraordinary is super flattering. Mostly though, I just love having excuses for my behaviors. For instance I discovered that my top strength (via Strengths-finders by Tom Rath) is Strategy. This means that I can see past unimportant things to the stuff that really matters. I took this as validation for the fact that I haven’t made my bed, for my whole life – but I have brushed my teeth with religious dedication, for my whole life. See how that works? Brilliant. As my friend Chris Austin says, every gift has a soft underbelly. Every strength can be flipped on it’s head to be revealed as a potential weakness. Not cool and not fair. That basically means we are all crazy. My most revelatory moment of self-discovery came at a high cost to my bank account…and my husband.

The strength whose underbelly I will expose today is my God-given ability to see potential. I was born wearing these internal glasses that allow me to see things, not as they are, but as they COULD be. In my work as a voice teacher and songwriting coach, this gift enables me to pull the gold out of my students’ efforts and give them a peek at what I see. It encourages them and helps them to believe in their own potential. In my work as a mother and spouse, this makes me Pattyworld’s most vocal advocate. I will contend for their potential and see pretty much only that.In my work as a Pastor, this quality enables me to see broken, messed up people as folks who just need another chance. It means I love old stuff. It means I heart garage sales. It means goodwill is my favorite place on the planet.

I am sure you can already sense the danger these internal glasses can put me in. This strength sometimes disables me from seeing things as they really are. This means that sometimes I refuse to stop “helping” when someone doesn’t want any more “help”. It means I have a hard time facing the fact that my children would ever do rotten things. It means that I might look right at a gaping possum hole under a kitchen sink and give it a solid, hopeful thumbs up.

When Barry and I only had Russell, circa 1997, we were living in a tiny duplex in Fort Worth, TX. Barry was away and I drove through a neighborhood with older houses, which are my favorite kind of houses. I was swooning out the window at them when I spied a “ For Rent” sign in one of the yards. It was an older, small, blue house and I could see that people were working inside it. I got all excited. What if WE could live there? There were workers renovating it that very moment, which meant that it was about to have it’s potential tapped into (my favorite thing.) I pulled over, wrote down the number and sped home to dial it (1997=no cell phone).  The landlord said he would let me in to see it and later that same day I met him back at the blue house to get a look inside. I saw the hardwood floors and smelled fresh paint and I was sunk. I walked behind the landlord with my baby on my hip, imagining us living there. No yucky carpet. White paint on the walls. A fenced backyard with, wait for it…..monkey bars!  Sure the kitchen needed some work but the landlord assured me that would all be done – note: he did not say by whom. I told him I needed to call my husband to make sure but that I was pretty sure we wanted it.

I was so excited when I called Barry and told him allllllll about it. I gushed about the floors, the moulding, the paint, the monkey bars and the garage. My husband wants me to be happy and LOVES to bless me. He said that if it was what I wanted, he trusted my judgement and that I could go ahead and put down a deposit. Annnnnnndddd…that’s where he went terribly wrong. Trusting my judgement. We had only been married for three years and he knew very little about my judgement in regards to acceptable places to live. He will never make a mistake like that again.

I slapped down that deposit and the landlord then explained to me that if I wanted to get in it right away, perhaps I should come down and help with the kitchen clean up. I did not know that this was illegal and wholeheartedly agreed. The next day, I packed up Russell, a pack & play and a bunch of cleaning stuff. With Russell beside me and hope on my side, I set to work in the kitchen. I opened some cupboard doors and started wiping them down. Mounds, I tell you, mounds of cockroach poop came out on my cloth. I gagged a little but pressed on. After all, in the other room there was fresh paint! I cleaned cockroach and mouse crap out of kitchen cupboards for about an hour until I started to wonder if it was even safe to have an adult messing around in that stuff, let alone a baby in a pack and play nearby. Poop triumphed over paint and I abandoned ship. I went home and called Barry to tell him what I had done that day, per the landlord’s request. He was a tad upset. He clued in that something was fishy and asked me not to go back until he could go with me.

When Barry got back into town a few days later, he went with me for his own viewing of our new home. Barry is not gifted/cursed with potential glasses so his eyes actually work correctly. He wasn’t charmed enough by hardwood floors not to notice that I had made a terrible mistake. First off, he noticed that this house had inches of space between the outside doors and the floors. Heat, cold and probably also snakes or small cats could have entered at will. He also immediately identified the monkey bars as a “death trap”. But when we got to the kitchen, that’s when he began to understand the debilitating effect my strength can have on my decision making. He was utterly and appropriately disgusted by the cupboards. He kicked the cupboard underneath the sink open to reveal a possum sized hole where we could clearly see the backyard and the monkey-bar-death-trap. He said to me, “Honey…a possum could come in through that hole!! What the….why did…what were you thinking???? We CANNOT live here!” He went on to say that he would rather lose that deposit money than live in that house.

I felt sick to my stomach. What was wrong with me? How could I so easily be bewitched by a can of paint and some hardwood? Why did I consider inordinate amounts of poop an acceptable obstacle? How is it that I cannot see possum holes?  Something was obviously very, very wrong with me and now Barry AND I both knew it. I was shocked at myself and apologized for my weird behavior, embarrassed for Barry to now know this about me.  Barry is a merciful human and a kind husband. He quickly forgave my glaring, absurd oversights and got us out of the deal right away. We lost our money but remained safe from cockroaches, snakes and possums.

This was a huge learning moment for me that I still harken back to when analyzing how I am perceiving a given situation. For instance, a few years later, when it came time for us to buy a house and only one of us could fly to Colorado to look for one, we both knew that we could not send me. We sent the guy with the accurate vision and a short list of my “must haves” and he did a stellar job of finding a beautiful home for us.

Also, there are times when Barry has to gently bring to my attention the “possum holes” in a person I am seeing too much potential in. He now knows that I am designed in a way that makes me the last person to see it when someone is using me, manipulating me or straight up screwing me over. He helps me learn to strike a balance between cheering someone on and cleaning poop out of their cupboards.

I am so grateful to know this about myself. I now think of myself as a gifted potential-seer with a moderate to severe case of Possum Hole Disorder. We need people in the world like me. And we need people in the world like Barry to keep people like me from making bad life choices. What’s your strength/weakness, gift/curse combo? Comment below, cuz I’d love to chat it up with everyone else out there who realizes that they are crazy.