lessthanperfect

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

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.