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My parents and grandparents will be arriving any minute. The four of them come to St. Louis for a weekend every fall, and it's much fun. Well, it would be much fun, if I can keep myself from springing apart at the seams from stress. These weekends are short, and I don't want to spend them running in circles. I like for things to be planned and ready to go.

Irony, of course, is that the planning and preparing wears me to a frazzle.

There's no place where my perfectionism is more of a blessing and a curse than in the kitchen. I hold myself to an insane standard, which means that most of what I cook turns out wonderful. I have the culinary education. I have the cooking business experience. There's not a damn reason why everything that comes out of my kitchen shouldn't be perfect, and there's not a damn reason why I shouldn't be able to do it without breaking a sweat.

Well, no reason aside from my stupid humanity.

Here's what I've made today:

On the left, a pineapple upside-down cake for Grandpa Chuck's 82nd birthday. Made from scratch. No yellow cake mix, and it contains more butter than you've probably eaten in the past two years combined.

If you made me a pineapple upside-down cake from a mix with margarine, I'd still love it. I'd love it because you made it for me and thought of me, and because of the company you provide me.

On the right, a pumpkin loaf - made from a Trader Joe's mix and you can gurandamntee that anytime I talk about this cake I'll include the words "made from a Trader Joe's mix" because I don't want to take credit I haven't earned - covered in homemade maple cream cheese icing, walnuts, and pecans.

Now, tell me how that cake on the right compares to this:

This is a bowl filled with the lump I cut out of the middle of the pumpkin loaf so it would look more perfect, covered with the leftover cream cheese frosting. It's a big bowl of cake and frosting, just tossed together willy-nil.

I think it's telling that, within minutes of uploading both photos, Kristina commented, "Dude! I want some!" on the bowl of scraps without saying anything about the pretty, pretty picture.

Believe me, when I had the pretty cakes next to the bowl of scraps, I wanted the bowl of scraps, too. That big, tossed-together mess, for some reason, is worlds more appetizing than the fussed-over cake.

This is what I'm making for dinner:

It's my homemade tuna casserole, which my mom and granny requested. There's not a can of cream of __________ soup in sight. There's noodles, albacore tuna, fresh celery and onions, mayo (hush, that's what makes it special and good), thyme, and fresh-grated lemon zest. But it's lacking one of the most crucial ingredients - sour cream. All because I told someone who lives in this house that I needed sour cream and pineapple from the grocery store, and someone screwed up.

If I come to your house, and you serve me tuna casserole made with cream of mushroom soup from a can with nary a hint of sour cream or lemon zest, I'll love it, and I'll love you for thinking enough of me to invite me to dinner, to sit with me, to take the time from your life to open those cans and think of me.

But if you make assumptions about my tuna casserole that impede with my ability to make a perfect tuna casserole, woe be unto you, my friend.

The worst part, though, is that in my zeal to get everything done and perfect today, Clara Jane's the one who paid for it. My energy and nerves were so shot that it left nothing for her. My patience were short and I snapped at her when I shouldn't have. It ended with her standing in her bedroom, sobbing, and me having to leave her there with her big-girl underpants around her knees while I stomped off to the kitchen, goddamn it, to pull a fucking cake out of the oven while I try to get ahold of my mom to bring me some fucking sour cream and fuck it all, the food can just rot for all I care at this point.

I pulled the cake from the oven without even testing to make sure it was done. Slammed it on the counter, stomped back to my screaming kid without even turning off the oven. I got her dressed, carried her back to the living room, and we sat on the couch under her fleecey monkey blanket, reading books for an hour while the uncovered cakes grew stale.

I know it doesn't matter. Rather, I know people say it doesn't matter if the cake's from a box and maybe a little too gooey in the middle. I know that if you made a boxed cake for me and it was a little underdone, I'd still love it because you made it for me. But I've gotten a different messages in my life.

I think of this every time I screw up in the kitchen:

B. and I got married on a Sunday. His parents arrived in town the previous Friday. I'm not sure why. They showed up at our house right before we left for my hometown. They spent the night at our house and hung out with B.'s brother, who was still living in St. Louis, and the three of them came to my hometown the next day.

When they arrived, my mother-in-law was talking to my mom, and the first thing she mentioned was that I had left a dirty plate on the counter when I left.

This was the weekend of my wedding. Despite all the craziness that ensues, I had made sure our house was clean and ready for my in-laws. I was still in that phase where I wanted to impress them, a phase I am 100% over now. But shortly before we left, I toasted a bagel. A plain bagel with nothing on it. But since I didn't want to be a slob and get crumbs on my clean floor, I put my bagel on a saucer while I ate. And since we were running late, I left the saucer, which only had a crumb or two on it, beside the sink.

And my mother-in-law saw fit to inform my mother of my slobbish ways.

No, one incident with my mother-in-law isn't the reason why I can't hold my shit together when something goes wrong in the kitchen. It's just one example of the message I've heard all my life. I'm remarkably skilled in tuning out the good messages and only hearing about the dirty plates I've left on the counter.

In writing this, I keep getting memory flashes of every failed dish I've made. The time I served the in-laws fried chicken that was raw in the middle (which might have been a subliminal passive-aggressive mistake). The time I served Kristina raw fish - not sushi, but undercooked fried catfish. The chef in culinary school screaming at me for adding cut beets to a salad without rinsing them, which made the dressing turn an unwanted pink. Every single pot of rice I've made in my entire life that's turned out burnt on the bottom and crunchy on top. The time when I was little and I turned on the hand mixer before emersing the beaters, sending a spray of frosting onto every cabinet in the kitchen. The cut-out cookies I made for a catering job, even though I told the client I suck at cut-out cookies, only to have her throw a hissy fit because, guess what? The cookies sucked, just like I told her they would.

I once got a standing ovation, led by a restaurant critic from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a meal I prepared single-handedly for 20 people, and yet those things listed above are the things I remember.

There's a Laurie Berkner song called I'm Not Perfect. Clara Jane adores this song. Asks to listen to it and sings along with it. Perfectly, of course. And when she does, it tears me apart to hear her say, "I'm not perfect. No I'm not. I'm not perfect but I've got what I've got. I do my very best. I do my very best. I do my very best each day. But I'm not perfect and I hope you like me that way." I think the thing that just shreds me about this is, when she sings that, it seems like she already understands something I've struggled with my entire life, and continue to struggle with.

Wouldn't it be just perfect if that song shuffles up today? I'll be listening to it with a great big mouthful of cake guts and spare frosting.

1. Dangerous Type - The Cars
2. Stranger in a Strang Land - U2
3. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands - Bob Dylan
4. Cuyahoga - REM
5. Right-Hand Man - Joan Osbourne
6. Kiss Me - Sixpence None the Richer
7. Bells for Her - Tori Amos
8. Monkey Gone to Heaven - The Pixies
9. Outro with Bees - Neko Case
10. I Want to be the Boy to Warm Your Mother's Heart - White Stripes

What kind of cartwheels do I have to pull?
What kind of joke should I lay on her now?
I'm inclined to go finish high school
Just to make her notice that I'm around

That shuffle's perfect. Except for track #6. Sixpence None the Richer's totally Amish.