Pressured for Perfection

Let me share with you a text that I just sent to Ryan:

"I need new clothes!  I need to get our new house decorated to perfection!  I want to be a great employee!  I want to be the perfect mom and wife!  And I want to make fun food and decor for the holidays!  Why am I so tired all the time?"

Do any of you other moms feel this way all the time?  I am pulled in one hundred different directions from the moment I wake up in the morning until the second my eyes close at night.  Most mornings I am scrambling to get myself and my second grader ready for the day in a timely fashion (failure rate: 70%), then I spend the majority of the day at my challenging and dynamic job, and then my evenings are full of cooking dinner, getting homework done, walking dogs, and doing all the things that keep the household running (cleaning, laundry, etc).  When do I have time to do anything else?  Where do these moms find time to interview their kids, put together scrapbooks, and bake cookies shaped like reindeer?

I have a fantastic husband who helps me every step of the way - his mornings, days, and nights look exactly like mine.  Where does the time go?  I don't feel like I give anything the attention it deserves because I'm always spread so thin!

Oh and the guilt.  Do they ever tell you about the guilt when you're a new mom?  Never.  They tell you about the exhaustion, the lack of patience, the weight gain.  But they never even begin to mention that new emotion that you're doomed to spend the rest of your life with: guilt.  "I should be doing this.  I should want to do that.  I should have done this.  I'm not doing that enough."  All.  The.  Time.

I blame some of this on social media.  When I'm on Pinterest, I'm pinning ideas that I know I'll never get to carry out because I'm to tired/busy.  When I'm Facebook, I'm looking at someone else's highlight reel while living my own outtakes.  And when I'm on Twitter, I'm indulging in sports talk and celebrity gossip (enter guilt).

When am I going to host a Southern Living Thanksgiving?  When am I going to be dressed like I walked out of Vogue?  And when is my house going to be decorated like an HGTV show?  And when am I going to realize that living and being happy means that none of these things will ever come true?  More important than a Southern Living Thanksgiving is one where I'm surrounded by family enjoying themselves (and a Cowboys win).  More important than being dressed like a super model is being there for my child and my husband.  And more important than a pristine and well-decorated museum is a comfortable, homey place for the whole family to relax.

And I need to give myself credit.  Cooking two days out of seven isn't that bad.  The house is usually pretty clean considering the zoo that resides there.  And I do just fine decorating most of the time (I think).

But until I learn the accept the above, this is how I feel most of the time:

Via