Sometimes it happens…

Sometimes, the alarm clock goes off and as I roll over in bed and peek out the window, I can see darkness.  And cold.  More cold.  The days are getting shorter and I’m starting to miss waking up to the sun.

Since the kids are enduring their first colds of the season…they haven’t slept well.  Which means we haven’t slept well.  Which also means that, sometimes, I want to take my giant down filled blankets…tuck them close over my head…and wait for another day to come around.

But I don’t.

Instead – with my hair all disheveled and my eyes still groggy…I walk down the stairs…kiss my husband goodbye…and patiently wait for my first coffee of the day to kick in.

If I’m lucky, the kids will stay asleep for a little while longer…and so I put off the inevitable for as long as I can.  But it eventually happens.  I eventually sit down to my computer…log on to those brightly lit screens…and proceed to watch the world – the world inside my computer – unfold in all it’s polished perfection.

I’ll catch up on Facebook with the latest birth announcements…engagements…and thirty second slideshows of everyone’s happy faces.  I’ll head over to Twitter to see everyone’s witty commentary on their early morning runs and their latest celebrity sighting.  Then, of course, Instagram – the land of romantic dinner parties, amazingly coordinated outfits of the day, and perfectly lit selfies!

And yes…sometimes it happens…

Sometimes, I wish that I had just tucked those cozy blankets over my head and called it a day.  Because that world in there…in those news feeds and with those hashtags…that is not my world.

While you’re posting pictures of your beautifully behaved children in impeccably gorgeous outfits…I’m secretly wondering how my kids and I made it this far without appearing on the six o’clock news.  While you’re showing me your newest amazing eye shadow combination…I’m the girl in front of a youtube tutorial who accidentally glued her eye lids together trying to put on fake lashes.  While you’re cooking up that latest delicious vegan creation from scratch…I’m eating the other half of last night’s apple turnover for breakfast.

And most of the time I love it.

Most of the time, I love your life and I love my life and I love that we can share our lives together.

But sometimes, it happens…

Sometimes, on days when my socks don’t match and my teeth aren’t brushed.  On days when my kids spend hours screaming at me and we’re in the car for too long.  On days when there’s never enough coffee and never enough hours in the day.

That’s when that world makes me feel like I’ve failed to keep up with my own.  When the beautiful pictures and great statuses leave me wondering why mine doesn’t look the same.  Sometimes, that world and all of it’s perfection makes me wonder what I’m doing wrong.

Because my kids’ birthday parties don’t look like that…and my hair doesn’t curl like that…and my closets are never organized like that.  And my life certainly doesn’t transform with the simple click of a filter like that.

Believe me…I get it.  I’ve hit ‘share’ enough times to know that I feed the beast as much as the next person.  Maybe not with the ombre highlights I so admire or the DYI home project that I never get around to doing.  But I contribute to blurring those lines…likely, on a daily basis.  And I feel the exhaustion from both making it happen and from trying to resist.

And so, sometimes, it happens…

Sometimes, I wake up wishing that we had an app that blocked out filters and a hundred and forty characters reserved solely for the truth.  Sometimes, I want to wake up to scroll through a news feed filled with pictures of the laundry piling up and the Kraft dinner that we ate right out of the pot.  The meltdowns that we’ve endured and the shirt that we’ve worn for the third day in a row.  The email telling us that our photos weren’t chosen to be featured or the dark circles declaring permanent residency beneath our eyes.  The loneliness or the doubt.

And not because I wish that upon you or me or the person I’ve only met once before or not at all.  But because that way, I could comment and say “hey, me too!”  and we could realize that it’s okay.  It’s okay to be real…it’s okay to be imperfect…it’s okay to be honest.  That way, I could share my honest life with your honest life and together, we could lift each other up through these honest lives that we live.

Of course, that perfect photo above the clouds to your next destination will also appear…and that perfect moment out with friends will be too good to resist.  But guess what?  That is also honest.  Those unbelievable (and all too fleeting) moments happen…in all their wonder and all their perfection.  But I’m also willing to guess that they happen scattered among the rest.  Among the messy…among the unorganized…among the ordinary.

Among the honesty of it all…