lessthanperfect

Can I post poetry here? Maybe I can add a new Category, for the less-than-perfect poet….

…I promise I’ll be a more faithful blogger. The fatigue caused by my resolution to get up before the kids is catching up to me. The last two days I was hit by a bout of ennui…a sort of soul-wide shrug of the shoulders and ‘meh’ response to everything that comes to hand. Little tasks get put off often enough that they are no longer little, but complicated and tangled from being neglected, like an unpruned topiary.

On the other hand, I’ve been cooking again. So, although I’m still less-than-perfect, I think it evens out.

As if I didn’t already have enough good reasons to wake up in the morning (getting a good start on the day, having some quiet before the kids wake up, having time to blog and read), this morning I found another, more pressing reason staring me in the face:

Helping my husband get up and get a good start on the day - and get to work on time!

My dear husband is not the best sleeper in the world. Even when he gets a full nights sleep he is not a morning person. Difficulty winding down and getting to bed on time renders him almost impossible to wake. Yet he has a job that requires him (at least this month) to be on the road at 5:45 AM.

I need to get on a schedule, stop staying up too late, and start waking up in the morning. If I can get up at 5 AM every day, I could make lunch for dh, get his coffee, see him off, and have my precious early morning time before the kids are up.

Any ideas on how to make this happen?

Yesterday was a good reminder why I am still less-than-perfect. I was on a roll! I woke up early, made sure my husband had a lunch and coffee before he left for work, made myself tea and breakfast, blogged and got other internet things out of the way, and had muffins in the oven when the kids woke up. I cleaned, did laundry, took out the garbage, put away the Christmas decorations, and mailed a package. I washed dishes, chatted with a friend, built block towers with my sons, and tidied the play room. I did school with #1 son - reading and writing, and even an art project (we talked about sculptures and made one out of home-made playdough). I even made dinner in the slowcooker and baked fresh crusty Italian bread! DH was home on time, the boys were in bed on time, and I had an hour of reading by myself  before bed.

I felt like the perfect mother, wife, and housewife!

Then I woke up at 9am this morning when my boys woke up, and didn’t get out of my pjs or get breakfast made until an hour ago. I’ve been on the computer all morning, there’s a bill payment problem I have to figure out, and we’re short on groceries so lunch will have to be leftovers and I have no idea what to do about dinner. The baby is ripping apart a library book and the house is a mess. The sink is full of dishes from last night’s dinner that I meant to do early this morning!

At least days like today keep me humble. And less than perfect.

Here’s a new ‘less than perfect’ category for me - the ‘less than perfect’ neighbor!

This summer a single mom with three boys moved in next door. I was thrilled! She seemed really nice and very cool…very earthy, which I generally like (though I am the less than perfect earth-mother too, as will become obvious…)

My three year old #1 Son was very excited with his new neighbors and has asked to go play with them almost every day since they arrived.

Anyway…so, single mom is a very busy woman. I can respect that. We finally set a date to have a ‘movie night’ with our boys. I volunteer to make enough pizza for everyone, since I usually make pizza once a week anyway.

Comes movie night, and I find out that she’s made other plans and she and the kids are going to stay with her mother in another part of the city that night. But they’ll be around for a ‘little while’ she says. Also, she has a friend coming who also has a little boy.

Oh-kay. I was a little disappointed that we won’t going to get some relaxed getting-to-know-you time, but determined to make the best of it for my son’s sake. The whole family was supposed to come over and top their pizzas at my place, but at the last minute the mom decides to just send her boys and a bag of toppings.

So I let the boys (and my son) put on whatever toppings they like. One son covered half a pizza with a solid layer of sausage! The other put generous amounts of everything. Mine is an everything kind of kid to. I carefully made and set aside a little pizza for the baby, who I gathered is lactose intolerant, with the vegan cheese substitute my neighbor sent over.

Then, while my son went next door to play, I babysat the pizzas. Finally, I bring them over. By this point, it’s obvious that movie night is not going to happen, but I’m hoping to smooth over any disappointment with my delicious homemade pizzas.

Then I find out that the neighbor, her friend, and all the kids…don’t eat meat. Well, sometimes poultry. Never pig.

No religious or ethical reasons, just nutritional reasons. Something about genetics and knowing the best diet for their ethnic heritage is vegetable based.

Ok, so I guess I’m imperfect at tolerance too. But watching those little boys sorrowfully pick off the sausage that they had put on the pizzas was just about the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. (And watching that sausage go in the garbage was pretty sad for me too!) When I was a kid, if someone else was feeding you, you ate what they served unless it was literally going to make you sick, or you had a moral reason not to. My mom objected to soda pop as a beverage too, but she would never have approved of pouring it out if that’s what we were served.

Bleah.

So, anyway. I didn’t even think to ask if there was anything I shouldn’t allow the boys to put on the pizza. The oldest is 7 and I just figured he would know. Apparently they do eat fake meat (though never sausage) and his mom thought he might have been confused by that. My guess is that the kids probably have no qualms eating meat and other forbidden foods when they are at friends houses or at school.

Bleah again. And to top it all off - no movie, heartbroken three year old (who had been looking forward to movie night all week) and the mom, who I’ve been trying to get to know better, spent most of the evening on the phone. Which, above and beyond the awkwardness over the pizza, leaves me disinclined to try very hard in the future.

But my kid loves her kids. What’s a less-than-perfect neighbor to do?

Two months ago I did the very brave an ‘good parent’ thing of taking the tv away. It’s in the shed behind the house. I thought that this would serve the purpose of both lengthening my 3 yr old’s miniscule attention span, and force me to be a better mom by reducing my ability to abandon him to the ministrations of the electronic babysitter.

And it has, to some extent, done both of those things. In the time since removing the tv, Son#1 has both potty trained and learned to read. I know, that’s a funny contrasting set of talents to have correlated. Anyway….

On the other hand, I’ve discovered that I used to do housework while he watched tv. And housework has become increasingly hard to stay on top of (’stay on top’ in my defective less-than-perfect world means no more than 1 sink full of dirty dishes and no grit under my feet when I walk ;-P)

So yesterday I opened a new Pandora’s box - I let him watch a movie on Hulu. He only recently stopped opining the loss of the tv set (”It makes me sad when you take away the tv”) and now I have him begging from the time he woke up this morning for “a movie on the puter, Mama?!!”

Sigh.

I’ll figure out how to balance everything. Someday. Maybe.

Ok, Every day this week I’ve set the same blog header for this blog - a pretty picture of tea cups - and every day I find that I can no longer see it. I’m cutting and pasting the image location from my winkflash account. Has anyone got any idea why it should be disappearing?

I am of that generation that grew up with computers and I’m pretty comfortable with them. I even know just enough html code to be able to occasionally tinker with it a bit when something doesn’t look quite right. But I grew up in the age of Windows - which means that although your typical ‘use-friendly’ set up is intuitive for me, I still have no idea how a computer thinks. I can run my system tools when things slow down on me on my laptop, but I would be lost in DOS - my computer and I only speak to each other through translating applications.

Which is off topic, I realize. If any other today.com users know why my header isn’t behaving, please let me know!

One of the real challenges of this blog will be learning to write short posts regularly - daily even - rather than loooooong posts few and far between. When inspiration hits it can be hard to limit the flow of words, and it is so hard to get enough time to do that sort of writing. If I want to write something everyday I will need to learn to become more concise, less verbose. I need to be economical with my words.

Writing has always been a frustrating ambition of mine. I love having had written, but the writing itself is something like having teeth pulled. Or rather more like washing dishes - hard to get started, somewhat satisfying to do if you can just be left alone long enough to finish the job, but it’s never really finished or ever as clean as you imagined it could be.

I have other ambitions too - to be a better homemaker (look out dishes!), a better mother, a better wife. To be a better manager of the household funds (how can I say that more concisely). To be, as I said in the first post more.

Which of us doesn’t feel, well, a little ‘less than perfect’ occasionally? Moms in particular know what it is to feel constantly…adequate at best… in any number of categories. The standards set for us are so high. Keep house like Martha Stewart. Keep fit like Madonna.  Achieve like a CEO. Mother like June Cleaver. Cook like…your mother in law, often, or at least a fantasy version of your mother in law’s cooking. Be sexy like Angelina Jolie - she had twins, dontchaknow.

Obviously, these are unrealistic standards. There’s no guilt in not living up to them, even if they drive us a little crazy. By those standards we’re all a little less than perfect.

But what about our own personal standards - the little voice inside us that challenges us to be - not perfect - but better. When we accept ourselves as less than perfect, are we also tempted to give up on being anything more than we presently are?  Can we reject impossible standards without abandoning standards entirely?

So that’s me - less than perfect. God knows I could make a lot of improvements. I certainly hope so. I hope you will join me.