Confession time, I was an avid reader of Erma Bombeck as a child and teenager (she died when I was 19).
Even though I wasn't a mom or even close to being married at the time, something about how she wrote always resonated with me. I still have dog eared copies of her books and my husband can always tell I'm reading her by how I laugh (no joke).
She is still the one I turn to when I'm having one of those days. To quote Erma:
"I've always felt uncomfortable about the articles that eulogized me as a nurse, chauffeur, cook, housekeeper, financier, counselor, philosopher, mistress, teacher, and hostess. It seemed that I always read an article like this on the day when my kid was in a school play and I ironed only the leg of the trouser that faced the audience, knitted all morning, napped all afternoon, bought a pizza for dinner, and had a headache by 10:30.
For a long time, I was afraid to laugh at the contrast, for fear no one else would."
Around Mother's Day every year the "When God Created Mothers" post gets shared and is usually credited to "anonymous". I always want to yell at the internet, "That's not anonymous, that was written by Erma Bombeck!"
We are forgetting Erma, and it breaks my heart.
Erma was the first who taught us it was okay to laugh at ourselves.
It's okay not to be perfect.
We can love our kids and want to kill them at the same time.
The same goes for our spouse.
The main job of parenting is getting everyone out alive.
It's been almost 20 years since she died and we seem to be going backwards and not forwards.
With the explosion of social media and sites like "Pinterest" we get sucked into competitive parenting and striving for things like the perfect kids birthday party.
When did we lose our minds?
I'm not knocking those of you who can do the Pinterest stuff and cool theme parties, seriously, that's awesome, but I can't do that. It's not me. And to those like me, sometimes we need to hear that it's okay we're not like that. We get sucked into this idea of what and who we should be instead of being who we are.
We need to lighten up and laugh at ourselves a little more.
We need to give ourselves (and our kids) a break.
We need to give our significant others a break too.
We just need to do the best we can do and not worry about how we measure up to everyone else.
Now if y'all will excuse me, I'm going to go clean my house in 15 minutes with a 10-minute coffee break in between. ;)
