Sometimes I don't like my children. I always love them---I just have trouble pulling up an ounce of like when my three year old has gone boneless and is screaming bloody murder and I have to be at soccer practice (where I'm the coach) in FIVE MINUTES. GET INTO THE CAR NOW!
So anyway, sometimes I don't like them. And sometimes I have unkind feelings and thoughts toward my husband, or my neighbors, or my mother. (If you ever tell any of them this I'll deny it.)
BUT-- I try hard not to blog about it. I'm sure if you read my blog you'll mostly get the sense that my life is good-- full of sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, and dancing butterflies and singing frogs. And if it's not good, it's at least funny. And when I read your blogs I get the sense that you have perfect (or at least funny) children and wonderful lives and awesome husbands and you do amazing things.
This summer I attended a writing conference that had a class on blogging. As each of us introduced ourselves I noticed a pattern in the introductions:
"I'm So-and-So and I got into blogging because I wanted to write about REAL things." "
I'm Such-and-Such, and I started blogging because I was tired of reading about everyone's perfect lives and I wanted to tell it how it REALLY is."
"I'm So-and-So and I wanted to blog the TRUTH about being a mom. None of this fluffy, 'Oh everything is perfect and I am perfect' stuff."
Quite a few women seemed to be bent on blogging the nitty-gritty horror stories of life, implying that perhaps in the mommy blogosphere we slap lipstick on pigs and parade them around as if they are models. Or we pretend that pigs don't even exist.
Well. I admit it. When I blog I gloss over the horridness--I might not tell you that last time we went family camping I stormed from the tent at 3:00 in the morning, leaving my husband alone to deal with three small children because I was being a brat. Instead I will tell you about how the girls played all afternoon in the tent and how excited Hannah was to sleep in the forest and not be scared. She was so proud.
Why will I do that? Not because I want you to think I am perfect (although that would be nice. Next time you see me could you perhaps look at me in awe and ask how I do things so perfectly?), but because I strongly believe that life is what you make of it. And what I am trying vigilantly to make of it is joy, good memories and happy times. And if that takes a little writing gloss, so be it.
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Amateur Steph does her kindergartner's and preschooler's hair, feeds the baby and doesn't actually wear lipstick. She finds that feeding the baby is taking up most of her time these days. But even if it wasn't she still wouldn't wear lipstick.
Read her family journal blog at www.excitedandconfused.blogspot.com.
Photo by Flora Soos
