Stevie here. I’m the non-baby on the left in picture above. I’ve taken over John’s blog this week because I want to introduce you to someone. She’s called Supermom. It’s a funny phrase people throw around to refer to moms that “do it all”. The soccer moms. The PTA presidents.The moms that make homemade meals from scratch every. damn. night. Whether or not we want to admit it, I think all moms have at least SOME desire to be that mom. Sure, it may not be cooking, or dealing with other PTA members that you covet. But you want that sense of order. You want to have (or seem like you have) your proverbial shit together. 

My discovery of Pinterest marked the beginning of my slow decent into “Supermom Madness.” As I perused pin after pin of perfectly decorated homes, labeled pantries, adorable laundry rooms, Montessori-style playrooms, recipes that require 40 ingredients and twice as many mom-minutes to make, I would frantically save them to my boards. My obsession grew. I collected pin after pin about indoor/outdoor activities with every age group imaginable, pins about how to clip coupons and save money on groceries, but then I couldn’t eat those groceries because now I had pins that told me that I have to eat “super foods”. Pins showing me how to make my food pretty, my kids pretty, my house pretty, my pretty pretty!!

It was exhausting. 

Now I will readily admit that those pins aren’t logical. I’m sure the blogger that created it thought to herself “and now I will immortalize the last time this linen closet ever looks like this. Ever.” But I still looked at it and said to myself: that could be my life. That could be my linen closet! And that’s what filled my head every night when I went to bed. I wanted all the linen closets. I wanted all the bento lunches. The craft spaces, the spring outfits, the perfect party decorations with chalkboard labels and creative punches in amazing jars with hand-calligraphied signs. I wanted it all. And I couldn’t have it. And it drove me nuts. 

I had to take a break. I ran away from Pinterest for a while. Other moms must have been feeling the same Pinterest burn out I was, because around the same time I fled from Pinterest I started seeing articles shared by friends and fellow moms about not being “Supermom”.  Just be ok with the mess, they would tell me. Don’t bother folding your kids’ clothes, they said. They’re just going to get tossed around anyway. Don’t spend time cleaning when you could be playing and having interactions with your kids! Enjoy the moment! 

So, being the sheep that I am, I listened. You’re right, article. I’m no Supermom. I’m just a regular mom with my two kids and my full-time job. I should just go with the flow. Messes will happen but we will survive. The clothes will still be clean if they aren’t neatly folded. And I will be closer with my family because I will have spent quality time with them rather than cleaning!

I’ll just fast-forward through the chaos here and tell you that it didn’t go over well. Our mornings became a stressful shuffle of digging through what may or may not have been baskets of clean clothes, trying to find matching socks, searching through the kitchen to find my keys, John’s keys, ANY KEYS WILL DO. But we can’t because they are hiding underneath the unpaid, unopened bill on the counter that itself was underneath John’s belt. “JOHN I FOUND YOUR BELT!”

Our evenings became John frantically searching through the kitchen for something to make for dinner or pack for lunch the next day –  but we can’t  – because there’s yesterday’s dishes sitting in the sink, and a backpack? Seriously, who puts a backpack in the sink! 

Nice bed-time routines (you know, the part where the quality interaction with my kids is supposed to be happening) turned into grunted profanities because I unexpectedly had a toy rhinoceros embedded in the padding of my foot.

“Mom, why are you crying?”

“Because that rhinoceros is an asshole,” is not, under an circumstance, what I actually said. 

So yeah. It took having my foot impaled by a tiny safari animal to realize that this wasn’t working. I can’t be let-the-house-go-to-hell-so-I-can-live-in-the-moment-mom. I also can’t be Supermom. Well where does that leave me? 

I’ll tell you. If I knock of all the extras, it leaves me with “mom”. I’ll be mom. 

I’ll enjoy the moment. And I will fold socks. (Not that sock folding is a specific “mom job”, it’s just something I do.) I will be kind of spontaneous! I will be somewhat organized! And I will fail every once in a while! And I will forgive myself! And I will start sentences with “and!” 

I will run the race and not worry so much about finishing it. I do care. I love striving for that Supermom title. I loved making inspiration boards of things to do to the house. I love pinning cute outfits I’ll never be able to afford. MY LINEN CLOSET DESERVES PERFECTION, DAMMIT. PINTEREST, HONEY! I’M COMING HOME!!

I’m not Supermom. I never will be. But I can idolize those perfect, albeit pretend, Supermoms of Pinterest. I know I’ll never live in a world of perfect organization or herringbone accent walls, but I’d rather shoot for those stars and land on top of the world (yes, I just quoted Pitbull) than land in the gutter that was my house for a week. I can dream. And then I can wake up. And somewhere in-between, I can be mom. 

PS – don’t forget to come join the fun on the Ask Your Dad Blog Facebook page! We try to keep things neat and tidy there. But you know, Supermom.