We are in a race to be perfect more now than ever before.
In a world fuelled by social media, we are sharing snippets of our lives online, and moreover, we’re striving for these snippets to represent absolute perfection.
And we all do it; our need for the perfect aesthetic far outweighs our need for reality at times.
But mum Lindsay Wolf has alluded to this in a post she wrote for her blog ‘This Vegan Mom’.
“I can’t see my floor right now, you guys.”
“Plastic fruits and veggies, every doll that exists in our house, thick crayons and pieces of chalk, way too many teeny tiny books, and soggy baby puffs are strewn across my conjoined living room and dining room,” adds the mum-of-two.
Labelling herself a ‘certified neat freak’ Lindsay describes how her fifteen-month-old daughter treats the living room in their home: “To her, our floor is her mad scientist experimenting room - her opportunity to pull apart, dissect, and examine parts of a whole new world.”
This becomes quite an annoyance for the mum, who desperately wants to reorganise the toys only for her daughter to pull them apart moments later.
However, for anyone who had a perfect picture of what motherhood would look like, Lindsay reminds us: “It’s obliterated on a moment to moment basis.”
Depicting what motherhood truly looks like:
“More often than not, we lose our patience, our keys, and any level of seeming sanity.
We spend most of the day living in grungy yoga pants.
Some of us worry about our nonexistent careers while our kiddos are playing in front of us. Others worry we are missing out on our kiddos' lives while we work a full-time job.
We check our cell phones at the playground.
We get short with our partners and kids.
We forget to brush our teeth, shower, eat anything other than bread and coffee.
And just about daily, we feel like humongous failures when the evidence of our days do not match up with whatever seeming standards we've held dear.”humongous failures when the evidence of our days do not match up with whatever seeming standards we've held dear.”
Which is a stark contrast to the lives we witness on social photo-sharing platforms on a daily basis: “[These] are largely filled with the beautifully manicured, high-flying moments of our parenting.”
“These are the moments that remind us we are doing more than fail. But they don't realistically help us cope in the actual moments of failing.”
But this mum imparts her wisdom and tells us the raw truth:
“Despite our best efforts, we all fail again and again at this mummyhood thing. And it's okay.
I'm beginning to think that's the beauty of it all - learning to lovingly surrender to the big, old mess in front of us. I mean, that's what much of life seems to be so much of the time, am I right?
And the sooner we can embrace the art of being an imperfect mama, the sooner we can get on with being a present one.”
We are loving this mum's take on motherhood, and as for her tot, she seems like the most fun-loving fifteen-month-old ever!
Did you have a different view of motherhood before you became a mum? Does social media make you feel you're not good enough?
