If I had . . . If I had a million . . . of anything. No, we won’t go there.

If I had only . . .

That’s fertile ground. Basically, I’m a more-than-average contented person. Very few “if-onlys” come to mind. But there is one big one. To describe it requires background.

As a child I was pretty much left alone. I could discover, play, dream and explore without direction or supervision. My mom was busy, and assumed me to be a good kid — and she was right, most of the time. As a result, I mostly did what I wanted to.

In school I didn’t set records or burn up tracks. I was a slightly above-average student. Teachers saw me as the youngest child of a harried widowed mother who was also attending two teenage daughters who, no doubt, required much supervision. Long story short — I was on my own.

As such, I enjoyed discovery. I learned to read early and loved books. I skated and played in the snow. Sometimes I cleaned our apartment as best I could, without being asked, knowing I didn’t have to do it.

But this idyllic freedom I’m describing has one big disadvantage. I was seldom pressured to finish or improve anything I did. What was done was good enough.

Good enough is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it enables boundless self-confidence, and it never pressures. It certainly never highlights deficiencies. On the other hand, work is never compared for the “next step,” whatever that step may be. Places to improve are never pointed out, and seldom detected until too late.

Hence, I was just an average student because no one ever drilled spelling into me. I learned to write because I had some native skill and it played well in high school when the yearbook came out. I was excellent on the debate team (my first taste of excellence) because I loved the work that made a debater. Learning research in that manner helped me to do well in the courses I wanted to.

But it left me without enough discipline to do many of the things I would have liked to do later on. I could put out a decent term paper, and did a reasonable piece of original research for a college degree. I snuck thorough with a master’s in education. But in any serious advanced research project, I probably would not have made it, or I would have changed my ways.

The defects of this growth also show up now in how I do most things: by the skin of my teeth. I’m always fighting deadlines, finding misspelled words after I’ve sent the item, losing things I didn’t put away and doing a half-witted job of something I would like to be perfect.

By the grace of God, I raised six wonderful kids, some of whom are perfectionists, some of whom make the same mistakes I do. All of whom are substantial citizens, successful where they want to be, and reasonably happy. So the system, or lack thereof, isn’t all bad.

I sometimes cover my deficiency by saying, “Anything worth doing is worth doing a half-assed job.” And contrary to popular thinking, that philosophy isn’t all bad. It leaves me willing to try many things that perfectionists will not. And occasionally I succeed where people who have not tried won’t even dare to go.

But there are days when — looking for lost keys, picking up stray underwear or wiping grease off the wall — I do say, “If only I had learned to be careful.”