Here’s the truth, we all work so hard to make sure that we “appear” that we have it all together. When we have a friend coming over, we clean our house and have a shower and straighten our hair and put on makeup. By the time company has arrived, we have spent the whole day just preparing the illusion that we are calm, successful, and naturally accomplished in our day-to-day.
On the other end of the couch sits a mom who has spent all morning getting herself and her kids ready to get out the door for this coffee time. She was running late so she left her house a total sty and figured she’d fix it up when she got home. She walks into your house, looking just as presentable and swooping in with an easy grace of a woman in control. Meanwhile, she sits there, stealing glances at your visibly smudge-free windows and cleared counter tops, and is racked with guilt. By the time she’s visited for an hour she just needs to get home because her own mommy guilt can’t let her sit there another minute feeling like a failure, she has to go home and make her house at least presentable!
Do you see the irony in this game we play? Everyone running around, building the illusion only to meet some arbitrary “standard” that actually doesn’t exist. In real life, we are all just struggling to keep it all together. We might have our house together but be failing in our marriage. Maybe we are kicking butt at the mom thing but our house feels like an obstacle course. None of us is perfect, and what we need more than anything isn’t a visit in a clean home, but the grace of a friend who will be real with us so that we can be real with them.
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My Real-Life Mommy Confessions
So today, I want to share with you not 10 tips to success, how to have happy kids or a happy marriage. Instead, I want to share with you 10 failures; confessions if you will. I want to reach out to some mom out there that has had a bad day or feels like she is losing the battle, to say: “You are not alone!”
Above all, I thank God for a new day. Tomorrow is always a new day, with new opportunities and a fresh start. There is ALWAYS grace for tomorrow my friend. And there is grace for some friendships on our journey, if we can start being authentic and let down the wall of perfection along the way. I can almost guarantee you will be blessed by your vulnerability. Because it is only when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, that we can truly go deeper than the thin shallows of surface relationships.
