Keeping It Real

Lately...well okay, this past week....I have been feeling this desire to be more transparent, more vunerable...more REAL with people. The other day, while thinking about this, I made a list of the things that I struggle with or the things that are my obstacles in life that seem to hold me back or come up again and again in some form. They are things that you may or may not know about me, but they're real life, and I feel called to be more real. I was thinking about how best to do this and remembered I had this blog that I literally never write in! So I signed on here and, low and behold, found several half-written posts pertaining to the exact topics I had written on that list. Coincidence? I think not. They are posts that I had started to write over the years and then chickened out in actually ever publishing...Over the next few weeks, I'd like to try to revise and post some of them...to expose some of those things that make me human. I won't get too weird or too crazy or too personal, of course, but sure, there's some discomfort in revealing and dissecting issues.

To keep myself accountable, here are the topics I hope to blog on:
-Career/Stay-at-home mom gig
-PPD
-On being enough
-On body image
-On finding joy and contentment

The first unpublished post (dated 9/15/15) seems to kick this concept off well & is quoted below:

"This particular topic has been on my heart a lot lately: Everyone has something. Everyone has some burden they are carrying, some load to bear, some thing that is driving them crazy, some issue that is unresolved, some problem to solve, some bill to pay, some health concern, some pain, some SOMEthing! There's not one of us that doesn't walk around stuffing or holding onto the things that we're struggling with! I've been reading an awesome book lately: Trophy Chid: Saving Parents from Performance, Preparing Children for Something Greater than Themselves by Ted Cunningham. It's really great-- you should check it out! And I've been feeling convicted about the fact that so many of us as parents want to feel like we've got it all together and like everything flows so smoothly in our lives and our kids' lives. A section of the book discusses social media and the image we put out about ourselves and how the world sees our best, even at our worst. I'm certainly guilty of posting happy, glowing pics of my girls and don't post (or take!) the pictures of the tantrums, arguing, talking back, messes, issues, crying and more... It's really easy to forget that on my "worst" day, someone else is dealing with something too!!

But here's the deal, since we all have different thresholds, my best day may be someone else's worst. My worst day may be an awesome day in someone else's life. We don't KNOW what someone else is facing, because we aren't living that life. Sure, we have friends and family we confide in. And we talk to people that we love, but even then, we can't truly know what someone is facing or how they feel because plain and simple, we aren't them! 

So my prayer and hope is this: Maybe instead of hiding our things, or worse, comparing and trying to "one up" our worsts and our struggles and our "oh I have so much stress in my life" etc, etc, we could try to just love and just listen. To just love each other. To just take a moment and have a conversation. To just get to know the heart of someone else. Everyone has something, friends. Everyone struggles with something and everyone has limits. Let's stop trying to dissect whose life sucks more or who has a bigger problem, and let's just love."