Perfect Lives

I have managed to ignore the whole blogging world up until now. Truly, I thought blogs were for tweens that were trying to find a life or a date just like My Space and Face Book. Okay, I admit I am in the dark ages. Recently some friends sent me links to join Face book. I was flung back to high school- they wanted me to be their friend!!! It was like getting a football note passed to me by the popular girl at school.(Something that never happened) Right away I said yes I want to be your friend. Now I can hardly remember how to find my friends again. You can send a flower, you can poke people and super poke them, and write on their walls. A flower sounds okay, a real one anyway. And the pokes sound mean but I don’t think they are supposed to be. Basically I have been so busy following adoption yahoo groups I haven’t had time to explore them any further.
And then, two blogs inspired me to create this: farminmama and Backwoods Boogie Farm.
I wanted my life to look like theirs. This blog has been set up for a week now and I have been unable to post anything. I just keep going to their blogs and the blogs they recommend and I get lost in their wonderful lives. Their knitting is awesome, their houses beautifully designed and organized. My favorite was Farminmama’s corners of my home.
How do they do it? The corners in my house have rolled up socks and cat hair tumbleweeds. I would like to pretend they don’t. I used to comfort myself with the saying “creative minds are rarely tidy” but I know from looking at their creative and neat homes that it is not true. Why is everyone able to manage better than me? Why are they all prettier, more organized, thinner, and more creative? I want to be them.
How can I find beauty in my own life? So much of it feels out of my control, the day slips to an end with me still trying to catch onto it and accomplish something. My To-Do list is always too long to complete so I go to bed, remaining a failure no matter what I accomplish. The absurdity of how my house looks is what strikes me the most. The most polite way I can think to describe it is severe disarray. Is it really possible to have a house where nothing looks good? I spent the last two hours searching through my house for pretty things. I did find a few. My goal was to find them as they were and shoot them untouched. But I’ll admit I wiped away some dust, flung a few socks out of the shot, but basically these were the moments I found. And I really had to search. So a new goal is to clean, organize, downsize my house with photos in mind. Does this make a pretty picture? Does this? Is this what I want my life to look like?














As I sit and type this with a bad flu I picture all these other women, the beautiful ones, knitting in some quiet corner by the fire as their children play close by and their loving husbands look on with kindness as they whittle doll house furniture after a hard day at work. They are all content and happy after a well enjoyed all-organic meal with lots of fresh kale and some wonderful whole grain and vegetable medley. In contrast, the breakfast dishes still wallow in my sink, we have skipped lunch, made burnt chocolate chip cookies and I feel too achy to think about dinner. I can’t bear to hear my family complain that I have served them once again, horrible whole grain food so instead I serve nothing and they happily order pizza. Bad mommy. Bad,bad, mommy.

Husband: What’s wrong with you?
Me: I’m sick, remember? And I have been looking at all these blogs and Face Book spaces of my young and pretty friends leading such perfect lives, having fun, going out…
Husband: You had a time when you were young and pretty. You were traipsing around Europe then. We don’t go out like your friends because we have too many of these.

He throws a stack of bills on my computer.
Damn husband. Why don’t you go whittle something for the doll house?