Meet Bridget - she's a
fellow MOPS mom who regularly attends our meetings, and has kindly offered to
share her heart with us on the blog. Bridget writes:
I have a problem that
I'm working on. Well, I think about it. I think about working on
it. I spend too much time on my iPad/iPod and now I have a
smartphone. If there is a lull in my day, I plop down and I bring up
facebook or pinterest or bloglovin. I scroll through ideas, pictures,
updates, pins, blogs, quotes. While I am tuned in to my screen, I'm tuned
out of my life. I think that's the point and the reason I am scrolling in
the first place. I need to escape.
It's becoming clearer
to me that these outlets annoy me. I have always been appreciative of
messy authenticity. Leanard Cohen spoke to my heart when he said the
thing about the crack letting the light in (Okay, googled it.... his name is
spelled Leanord and the quote it "There is a crack in everything, that's
how the light gets in.") I adore that. From a sociological
perspective, adversity and the ways people rise above, has always fascinated
me.
So, I get
absorbed in all of the updates I see. My son graduated from A.P. physics with
honors and thanked me in his speech. I ran a marathon last week and am
training for another with a better time. My personal favorite: <3
<3 my boyfriend, he bought me a Dt. Pepsi when he went to the store (man of
the year?). They tend to read like a greatest hits album of that person's
life. But I want the B side. I want to see updates like the ones
above, paired with updates of the real stuff: I fought with my husband
last night for some reason I can't remember and he slept on the couch. I
cooked a meal from scratch (kind of) and the kids wouldn't eat it so I yelled
at them and then felt guilty. My boyfriend is a jerk and doesn't know
what pop I drink so he bought me the kind he likes instead.
Then I switch to
my pins, and see all of these pictures of perfectly organized, beautiful
houses. They are bound to be filled with expensively dressed moms doing
paint chip crafts with adorable, slightly messy, appreciative kids. These
are such false images. They need to have pictures of an almost perfectly
organized house with mud tracks on the carpet. A picture of the kid
crying because the craft you were doing isn't turning out like he likes and his
brother ripped it in half. Or a picture of me after a long day, with my
makeup worn off and hair uncurled, rosacea glowing, exhausted, sitting in the
recliner. Probably with my iPad in hand..........
I think there
would be so much value in people telling the whole truth about their
lives. The good should be next to the bad. The slightly messy
mudroom with mostly organized backpacks: that should be the new perfect.
Or the status update saying I ran a marathon, but had to get babysitters to
train and my body ached for days. Good for you, it was hard work and
sacrifices were made for the result. Or better yet, all unphotoshopped
pictures of celebrities without extensions, false eyelashes and spray
tans. (I could write nine paragraphs about how these enhancements create
such an artificial ideal. And how that makes me mad.) That's
real. And if we started seeing those images, reading those statuses, we
would be more eager to see that it wasn't flawless, and that's okay.
That's better than okay. The light is shining through the cracks.
I read a book
last summer that was impactful to me: Daring Greatly by Brenee Brown. It
was mostly about vulnerability and the willingness to be vulnerable.
People who are what she calls "Wholehearted" are the most
resilient. And these wholehearted people are comfortable with
vulnerability. So, in the interest of honest "journalism" (If I
put this on a blog, I'm a journalist, right?) here are some of the things
I would like to say about myself that make me feel vulnerable:
My kids watch way too
much tv or iPad. I think about how to stop them all the time and follow
through 20% of the time.
I eat more than I burn
in calories. This makes me overweight. No special explanation needed,
it's that simple.
I hate the wrinkles I
am getting in the corners of my eyes (I'm 32........I thought that was still
supposed to be young).
I lie to my husband
about how much things cost all the time. I don't know why I think $5
makes something more affordable. It just sounds better to me.
There are some
redeeming qualities I could list here to counteract the less than desirable
ones I just put out there. But that's not the point. I do all of
those things, and I am still a person deserving of love and God's favor.
That's real.
-Bridget
