My response to the situation was completely ridiculous, childish even. I was upset and acted as if everything was now ruined. My husband stepped in and put the meatloaf back in the oven for fifteen more minutes, after which he checked to make certain it was completely cooked. I was not so cool. I pouted and silently berated myself, and then my husband and I repeated a discussion about my "problem" for about the hundredth time in our marriage.

Do you want to know the worst of it? The dinner tasted fabulous, but the bad taste in my mouth tainted my experience of it. My cooking blunder was not to blame, but rather my unrelenting insistence that everything I do be perfect, and that the external world do nothing more than mirror this perfection.