the one about enough

Luke and I were watching some old videos of the girls before bed one night. It is one of our favorite things to do. We like to snuggle up, pull out a laptop, iPad, or phone, and we like to reach back as far as our device will go and find the oldest, cutest, sweetest videos of our kids from their younger days.

Even though our children are relatively young at 7, 5, 3, and 6 months, we still yearn for those times when they were even smaller. We ache for those times and cherish these videos.

Luke found one that we hadn’t watched in a little while. Some of them, I know by heart. I can remember what the date was or why we were taking the video…I can even remember what I say or what the kids say…like the script of a favorite movie you just want to keep quoting (and annoying your friends as a result). This one, however, I had forgotten about.

The girls were being cute. Little Noelle, toddler Charlotte, and baby Shiloh. Luke was speaking to them in a soft voice, asking them questions and capturing their adorable responses. Where was I? What was I doing?

I was storming around the house, griping about shoes not being put away and how I have to clean up everything. You hear it all on the video. You can’t see me at all, but you know, you know, I was there. I wasn’t interacting with my girls. I most likely took the opportunity to do anything but be on camera so as not to preserve the extra baby weight I was wearing or the stress acne that had erupted on my face. Never thin enough, never pretty enough, never perfect enough to be preserved forever in a video.

At first, we laughed. It was kind of funny hearing me go on this mini-tyrade in the background. And then, I became sad. This. This is what my children will have of me when I am gone. A video of just my voice, bitching about some shoes that needed put into a basket.

This sparked something inside of me that said, “Enough.”

Actually, it screamed, “ENOUGH!”

Enough.

I have always placed a tremendous amount of pressure on myself to make sure that my house is put together, cleaned up, and organized. However, these desires strengthened ten-fold during my most recent pregnancy. Call it “nesting,” but I almost think I developed a weird OCD-meets-manic-meets-neurotic mindset where if the house was dirty, if things were out of place, I would feel physical illness. My head would pound. My stomach would knot itself. My neck would ache. It was a feeling like nothing I had ever felt before. I couldn’t sleep if dishes were in the sink. I couldn’t walk by a spot on the floor without getting a rag to clean it up. I couldn’t deal with toys left out, books on the couch, or laundry piles on the floor.

And when I say I couldn’t deal, I mean that I would express my frustration in crying, yelling, and really just throwing a big ass fit.

While those feelings have lessened over the past 6 months since having Leo, I do still feel that pressure. I worry that we will have unexpected visitors who will see our mess, and then they will think less of me as a mother, wife, “housekeeper.” I worry that my children will tell their friends that our house is a mess. I fear that if everything isn’t “just so,” people may get the impression that I am not OK, that I am not handling motherhood well, or that I am in over my head.

Luke has never placed this pressure on me. It is all self-imposed. But where did it come from? Honestly, in college, I was a slob. It was a well-known fact. My roommates would laugh at the fact that I would barely have a clear patch of floor in my room. Sometimes, I would stand at my doorway and take a flying leap over piles of clothes, magazines, and shoes, just to make it to the bed. It was the ultimate game of Hot Lava.

I don’t remember feeling stressed or anxious about the mess then. I don’t know what switched inside of me, except that maybe it is an undying, unending, never-satisfied desire for control.

In many ways, my life is very chaotic. I have four children that are ages 7 and under. My husband works a lot of hours at times, and we are building a house that has taken up 80% of his free time. Between transporting my children to and from school and activities, volunteering both at the school and in my community, working on my own businesses that I run, and keeping up with the general tasks of life, there is nearly zero time for self-care or self-control.

Cleaning my house and forcing my children to comply is one way that I can exert control. But it is not healthy. It is not right. And it will stop, today.

Everyone agrees that a clean home is desirable because it is about taking care of what we have. It is about treating our possessions with care. It is about having pride in ourselves and our home. I would never want to “let it go” to the point of embarrassment or filth, but is there enough wiggle room to allow a toy to stay on a rug overnight or a sock to get put in the laundry basket the next day or a shoe to take its time finding its way to the bin?

Hell yes there is.

I will not let something that takes 30 minutes to clean up ruin the chance for me to be an interactive, present parent.

When my husband graduated from residency, he made a speech in front of his peers, supervisors, and future colleagues. This is customary for all residents to do. He stood up there in front of everyone and said that his “wife was the Pinterest queen. I walk around the house and wonder, ‘How does she do it all?'” While that earned several smiles and sweet giggles from the audience, I immediately felt like a fraud. I thought, “He sees me as the Pinterest queen…the one who ‘does it all,’ yet I feel less like a queen and more like a horrible, evil wench who pretends to have her shit together, when really she does not. Even my husband can’t see it.”

I do get asked a lot, “How do you DO it? How do you take care of your kids and get involved with so much and keep up your house and brush your teeth?” I hear, “You are Super Mom” or “Wonder Woman!” I do not say this to brag about myself — in fact I get very embarrassed just like I did in the story above. It highlights to me that I am doing a terrible job of keeping it very real. We are all guilty of posting and sharing the shiny, glittery moments on social media and leaving out the ones we wish to hide or forget. We all know how to crop a photo the right way or find the best lighting or pick the most flattering filter. I am no different. I am no Super Mom or Wonder Woman. I am a human who struggles, just like everyone else.

As part of this cathartic post, I wanted to share photos of our everyday, real life, right now. These are less for you and more for me. I need to be OK with sharing my imperfections, my flaws, my real self. This is the only way that I will eventually learn to accept myself for who I am, and hopefully find myself IN the videos with my kids and not just complaining in the background.

Join me as I thank God for every messy, out of place flaw in these photos.