My Cape Is Threadbare...

The other day, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. We were talking about how thin we’ve spread ourselves with various activities for the kids, and she referenced my annual Christmas letter. She said that if she wasn’t already feeling like a loser, she sure was after she read it.

I was just… shocked…

I am sure she didn’t mean to throw me into a state of self examination over how I make other people feel. I am also sure that this is exactly what happened, whether she meant it or not…

Let me just debunk the Christmas letter myth for a minute here…

I spend countless hours every year writing about the ups and downs of my life, and the life of my family, in blog form. I have shared before how I actually received condolences after some of our vacation adventures were published. I am shameless in admitting things like my inability to perform dances in my 6 year old’s music class, my insecurity over my lack of savvy hair styling ability for my pre-teen daughter, my struggle with materialism, my frustration over the fact that I am never going to wear the cute, little clothes in my closet again, my postpartum depression experience, my severely inconsistent life. Yeah… If you’re reading this, you’ve probably read it all before… You get the picture…

I try to be transparent. I try to be real. I try to share a little piece of the human me, because super heroes are really cool, but they don’t connect all that well…

And then every December, I dust the pedestal off and compose the letter that contains a recap of life as I know it on my greatest days… and life as I wish it was all the time…

To be honest, my regular blog readers (all three of you) probably breathe a sigh of relief when they receive our letter and realize that even though I considered giving the goldfish CPR… and even though I fed the kids burnt pizza… and even though I cried when I threw away a couple of huge trash bags full of the kids’ art (and watched the garbage man heave it into the truck)… I haven’t really lost it completely!

The Christmas letter brings balance to the force… or something… Wait a minute, wrong theme… I don’t brandish a light saber while writing the letter… I wear my cape…

Oh yes… I should return to the subject at hand…

My cape…

My cape is threadbare…
It used to have a magnificent “W” on the back. I loved being “Superwoman” until I realized that I couldn’t save the world. People expected more than I was capable of, and well… it kind of lost its luster after that…

It’s been awhile now since I turned it upside down…

Come to find out, that was a bad move for “Superwoman”! (It was not a bad move for Lisa, but we’ll get to that)… Apparently, once you have brandished the shiny “W” cape, people don’t like it too well when you take it off. I’m suddenly not the highly esteemed, best… well… anything, anymore. I really hate that. I really hate that I gave… and gave… and gave… and gave… and gave of myself, and that when I finally said, “Hey wait! I have to stop, ‘cause there’s nothing left,” that was the end of a beautiful… well… just fill in the blank…

I hate it, but I’m learning to live with it…

I think maybe my biggest mistake was putting the cape back on…

I sure didn’t put it back on the way a lot of people wanted me too, either…

When I fastened it this time, there was a huge “M” on the back!

Enter “Supermom”…

Now, I have always tried to be a good mom. That’s not what I’m talking about here. But lately, I have tried to be an “everything” mom, and it’s not really working out for me. I have five children… count them… they’re a handful… literally!

If you do the math, you know that if every one of them participates in even one activity, we could potentially have every weekday filled with practices, classes, or lessons, and there would undoubtedly be events, games, performances, etc. on Saturdays… or Sundays… or both.

At the present moment, we have 4 children enrolled in music classes, 1 child enrolled in art classes, 2 basketball players, 1 cheerleader, and 3 Bible quizzers… We homeschool, we have play dates, and Phil and I run children’s church with the help of our beloved “Horsey” who shall remain nameless, because it’s just embarrassing when you’re a Junior in High School and multiple children call you, “Horsey”! This is all I can handle! No, really, this is more than I can handle! And the obvious question becomes, “Why don’t you just say no?”

Let me make my answer very clear. I do say no. I said no to gymnastics. I said no to dance. I said no to soccer. I said no to Little League. I said no to pottery class. I said no to swimming (and even canceled the Y membership). And I say no to circus, year… after year… after year…

Well… I thought I was going to become “Supermom”, but what I really became was ultra dirty mini van driving mom… I mean, the van’s dirty. I am not dirty. My one non-negotiable is that I will have time to bathe. When the activities start encroaching on my hygiene, we’re done (although actually styling my hair in any way or putting on make-up have gone out the window, so if you see me and there are flies swarming around my head and drool is running out of my mouth, you might remind me of this high standard I’ve set for myself)…

Somewhere along the line, though, I noticed that my cape was starting to unravel…

Maybe it was when Seth begged to not have pizza… again… last week…

Or maybe it was when Grace’s eyes almost spilled tears when she realized I had completely forgotten about her mini-musicale (which I did make it back for, just so you know)…

Or maybe it was when I adhered Caleb’s iron on stars to the iron instead of to his basketball shirt (when you are too tired to distinguish shiny side from fuzzy side, something’s wrong)…

Or maybe it was when I sat down to read to Ian and realized the book was worn, and I’d never read it to him before…

Or maybe it was when I was shouting through the house today that Grace should stop trying to teach Miah to walk, because I’d like to be there when it happens…

Ouch…

I am not “Superwoman”… and I am not “Supermom”… and maybe, just maybe, the number of accomplishments you can cram into a Christmas letter does not determine whether or not you are a loser…

Ouch…

I do not know where I’m going from here… Where we’re going from here…

I need to get things into perspective.

I’m going to be taking some time to do that.

Lisa