Occasionally against the better judgement of my brain I utter assvice to my siblings. Okay well to my sister, Auntie P, I probably do it more often than I don’t because we discuss the rearing of our respective children quite a bit. But I digress. Today was one of those days where I uttered a bit of well intentioned but nonetheless assvice. It made my brother mad. But that’s not really anything new either. I make my brother mad a lot. I’ve come to accept that it is a part of our unique relationship. I open my mouth – - – he gets mad. He opens his – - – I get exasperated. Luckily I don’t think it is affecting the love we have for each other.

Since I was working on a knitting project this afternoon, I had time to think down a tangent relating to well intentioned utterances and to being wrong. Not WRONG like evil or bad but just not correct. As in “I think A is going to occur.” But then in fact C or D occurs instead. Sometimes when walking about in the world it seems like it is not acceptable to be wrong. Or more precisely, if you are wrong do whatever you can to cover that fact up, so that no one will know that you weren’t correct. In my mindful wanderings this afternoon I realized that is one of those things that I want to teach my children.

Being wrong (incorrect) is not a bad thing and a person should be all right with being incorrect.  It allows us to make adjustments to our thinking.

Science is a perfect example of being all right with being wrong. And that probably is one of the many reasons I love the scientific method. Hypothesis didn’t work – no problem just refine it! Test a new one using the data and observations from the first one. And along the way if you are wrong, wrong and wrong again. Not a problem just keep refining that hypothesis and adjusting it to your new knowledge that you’ve accumulated along the way.

I think that it has become even more important to be all right with being wrong since I’ve become a mother. If I were to never think that perhaps I might be wrong how would I be able to be an affective parent? What if I didn’t step back from those days where I’ve spent more time being loud and nagging?  If I never sent a discipline choice packing and looked again to my options? If I never said oops maybe that wasn’t such a good idea? I wouldn’t never make a correction to my path and return myself to a better place from which to parent. I’m not afraid to be wrong. I’m not fearful that it makes me less. I’m not always right. There I said it. I’m not always right and sometimes when I’m wrong I learn more about something than I would have if I’d been correct. And that learning is so much more important that being right. When I’ve stumbled, especially when it comes to my parenting, that is when I’ve made solid discoveries of what exactly makes the core of my philosophy on life and parenting.

Sometimes I’m wrong. And I’m all right with that.