This will get “less views” and “less likes”…
But I’m sharing it anyways.
How many people care about the chaos of another human’s home?
But on Day 3 of “trying to dance again for the first time in a long time”, I found the scrambled-egg capture of a real home to be something that maybe (maybe?) someone out there (who?) would find comforting. And here’s why:
You can be a person with a lifelong disease and still have a family.
You can be a parent who needs the reminder that parenting is a VERB and that not enough of us talk about what a full time job, in of itself (unpaid and unacknowledged) it can be… and the things we do read sometimes feel like lies. It’s three times the verb you see.
You can be a homeschooling family, or the parent of teens who needs someone to validate the fact that: it doesn’t get easier. You are not wrong asking yourself: “Is this getting harder?” and longing for the infant days of dreamless nights. Wishing you didn’t have to hold a line when you’re in horrific pain (that’s not everyone technically but isn’t it also, always, everyone, technically?), or talk through the hard issues when you’re drained, or face the workout of working through self awareness and perspective and gratitude when you’re so insufferably sad inside that you’d rather stare at the invisible clouds in the ceiling and figure out a way to see tomorrow.
(You can be a human who feels those things… and still be a parent.)
You can wish you could just smell that Johnson’s sponsored smell and rock them as toddlers and not live in the “I’m an adult now!” door slam world of unformed frontal lobes, and belief that casting out of the nest according to some arbitrary number and not by an individual basis is oh so very American and oh so very tenuous at times (so many of us are still scarred from whatever the world back-handed us with when it said, possibly before ‘we’, that we were suddenly adults. As if one singular day magically makes us someone new). People define numbers; Numbers don’t have to define people.
You can be a people-pleaser and perfectionist, as I, and still share (while sharing your own sh*t and not the things your kids wouldn’t want aired) to share how life is all things exactly at once. It’s deep ugly truths… it’s letting your child take charge and following along for a change… it’s not knowing what your future looks like or how to have one… it’s music that transports you out of your small little A-frame home together, for just a moment.
It’s kicking coffee tables. It’s leaky feeding tubes AND tendus. It’s pain shredding up your left side and not much belief in otherwise [now that you’re 4 surgeries deep on that singular subject] and everything else heals except for the thing that’s breaking you. It’s being broken. It’s waking up untethered because you had a dream your girls didn’t want to have Christmas morning together. It’s limping upstairs the second this was done because the moment of deliverance was gone and you’re back in your body again.
It’s once having made 2 bodies with your body… And now you fight, laugh, learn, kvetch, and create all in 1 morning together.
It’s falling in love with them everyday for all your days… But knowing that failing and falling will always go together.
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Being broken is part of the uniqueness (and sometimes even charm?) of human life. However to show that brokenness is something of huge strength, and it's what gives meaning to that life lived. Never be afraid to show how broken you are, or your messy home, or messy life. I enjoy reading about these things, and those things are what makes us humans so special.