Tangled Web Woven

A friend of mine said something kind of genius...

"Christmas cards take too much effort.  Trying to fit all that 'pretend perfect' into a letter once a year is impossible!  Blogs are way easier because you have the whole year to try to fool people.  You can spread the B.S out a little bit more!"

Touché.

I think family pictures are pretty symbolic of this point also, at least when it comes to our little fam.  I don't know about your family pictures, but we normally take somewhere between 10 and 2,395 pictures in order to get ONE good shot where everyone is smiling and looking adorable...all the rest are the real moments when someone has either spit up or picked their nose...or chose what seemed like a cute outfit that would surely hide any love handles but, in fact, did the opposite ...cough, cough.  Those should probably be the ones that make it into picture frames because that is who we really are!

  Another friend of mine said, "I hate blogs.  People are either lying about their life being so perfect or they are funny about their life when it sucks."  (I'm paraphrasing there.)

This got me to thinking about these:

These are just a handful of pictures on our computer of me.  They are the ones that are hard for me to look at for one reason or another.  Pregnancy weight gain.   A huge spider bite in between my eyes.  What I look like when I wake up.  No make-up on and out of shape.  There are a lot more pictures (tons) that make me sad.  Everyone has them.  You should know that this is terrifying for me to give others access to.

But you should also know this...

As I was going through pictures trying to genuinely find the notorious ones that usually make me cringe, something happened.  Because the point of this was to find the "bad" pictures, I actually started noticing that there were a lot of good ones.  Pictures that reflected great times in my life, fun adventures, and wonderful moments with my children.  The embarrassing ones didn't seem as tragic to me, and I actually found myself thinking, "Ok, I don't look THAT horrible.  I could deal with other people seeing me at what I consider to be some of my worst photographic moments."

Then I thought outside of the realm of pictures.  I can be more comfortable with sharing the imperfect parts of my life too.  I can be ok with my struggles and weaknesses.  I don't have to try to hide who I really am, and I certainly don't need to be ashamed of the "bad" moments.  I can do away with the phony Christmas-card mentality.

So that's where I'm at right now.  We'll see how brave I can really be, because I'm not too sure how willing I will be to share that I just went to McDonald's after almost crying when I weighed myself at the gym the good, the bad, and the ugly.

*Staying true to what I just said about being more honest and blah blah blah, you should know that I am neglecting my screaming baby and have just yelled at my other child to be quiet so I could think and finish this post, and make all of you think that I am awesome.*

Progress.