Mom-Me Celebration - Day 26: Ignore those happy Facebook posts

Enjoying a delicious dinner with plenty of veggies I prepared with my kids. I love using my good china for every day meals.
Now that all the laundry's done and shelves are dusted, I can snuggle and read with my favorite teen.

Wistfully counting the minutes until my sweet cherubs return home from school.

You know those moms with Facebook posts like that?  Don’t they make you cringe and look around at your piles of laundry, pizza boxes, and tumbling in the living room floor children and wonder where you went wrong?  Here’s the solution to that: de-friend those people. Or at least, scroll on past their posts.

Recent research is revealing that reading Facebook posts makes some people (i.e. mostly women) feel sad and more depressed by way of comparison to their own lives.  (You can google “facebook envy” for more details.)  What?  I thought we were all on Facebook for fun? We surely don’t need another thing in our lives to make us all moody and reaching for a glass of wine to quell our feelings of inadequacy. We’ve got our kids’ report cards and dentist visits for that.

I laughed at a friend’s post the other day that essentially read, “came home from work and my baby threw up on me.” I wasn’t laughing at her – I can’t stand any type of projectile bodily fluid – but relieved that someone actually posted a real mommy moment. Motherhood is wonderful and beautiful and fulfilling.  But it’s also tough – it’s tiring, it’s dirty, it’s messy. And we don’t help anyone – not each other, not ourselves – in pretending that it’s all sweet milk breath and lullabies.

One of the reasons I like hanging out with my friends in real-life is because we can honestly say, “my house is a mess and I’m too tired to clean it up.” Or “I don’t know what to do about my kid’s science teacher.” Or, “Am I supposed to feel like this during pregnancy/after delivery/when they go off to college?” And someone will give you an honest answer. That’s helpful. That’s reassuring. That’s a friend.

Mom-Me Celebration: Something didn’t go right today but you’re still a good mom. Post it to Facebook (if you dare breaking that perfect vision of you as mom) and tag “Just Piddlin with Frances” so we can all feel better.  Now pass the M&M's and the remote, the kids will be home soon.

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Click here to keep Piddlin' with me on Facebook - JustPiddlin with Frances.