being perfect

I read a blog post yesterday where the author talked about how slightly jealous but mostly sorry she felt for the perfect women who surrounded her at the school pick-up, how much more tyrannical and less joyful their lives must be because they are so polished seeming.

As I read this, I felt a little up in arms. I’m hardly a picture of suburban pressed perfection, but I’m a pretty together person. I wear a bra and shave my legs; I generally try to brush everyone’s hair, including my own. I like to wear clean clothes. My house is super super neat and tidy. But I don’t participate in grooming activities because I feel pressure to appear perfect, I do it because I don’t LIKE the breeze blowing through the tiny hairs above my lip. I shave my legs because cotton sheets feel like silk on smooth legs. I brush my children’s hair because it gets tangly and I’m not sure that tangled hair and food on one’s mouth is the best way to present to the world. And maybe that’s a presentation issue, but you know? At nearly-four and six? They need to learn how to care for themselves, so they can then choose to reject or embrace hair-brushing at 18 or 24 or 40.

My writing group has talked about this too: more in the context of how we present ourselves as authors. Do we get less honest because we are concerned about appearances? Is that manifested in our daily lives through guilt over dusty houses or a concern that people won’t like us if we are not wearing posh shoes?

I’ve taken feminist lit classes and women’s studies courses. I’ve heard all about the cult of domesticity, the pressure on women to do it all. I’ve read mommy blogs, articles about mommy wars, and stories on mothers vs. non-mothers. I understand patriarchal oppression and colonialization.

What I do not understand is the assumption that the appearance of perfection is predicated on artifice. That people who have clean houses and relatively tidy children are somehow less authentically themselves that women whose children are unkempt in the late afternoon or who don’t have razor-cut layers or wear flip-flops.

I’m by no means perfect. I feel like I have zero ability to dress myself, although thanks to friends and magazines and so forth, I am getting to a place where I get dressed and feel happy with how I look in an outfit, comfortable that I am representing my soul and flattering my figure. I don’t think it’s oppression to play up one’s better features, nor is it artificial of me to want to wear things that I feel comfortable in. If you like wearing sweatpants, then so be it. But don’t assume I’m less myself because my shirt & skirt match.

My house is unbearably tidy to some, and ridiculously clean to others. That’s how both Husband and I like it. We like being neat. We feel oppressed by clutter; it makes breathing harder for both of us. I feel like I can’t work surrounded by stacks. I need to organize, to catalog, to create checkboxes and lists. I like it that way. The children are expected to clear away their toys, most days, because I think that, again, learning to care for your belongings is the pathway to rejecting that. Or deciding that you are okay with stacks.

But in my house? We tidy. We brush our hair. We brush our teeth. We get dressed sometimes, and other times we don’t. We remain ourselves: boisterous, argumentative, chatty, catty, lushy, crafty, writerly, and orderly.

Lazy Saturdays (on somewhat less lazy Tuesdays)

One of my favorite things about having friends who don’t have kids is that sometimes we end up having sleepovers at our house. Usually it involves a lot of alcohol the night before, although this particular time, it involved quite a bit of wine, but also a ton of amazing food at Mangia, an Italian food event that happens every weekend not far from us.

What’s even more fun than the impromptu sleepover is the impromptu lazy day that follows. This is not to say that every minute of our Saturday is washed away by sheer bumming, but we do tend to all lie in, once the children are set up with a video or breakfast, and then we all sit about dazedly gazing at the children, and then eventually we have breakfast. Sometimes followed almost immediately by lunch.

Last Friday, we went out for the aforementioned amazing meal. We woke on Saturday, and I made every adult a delicious egg-turkey bacon-cheese English muffin, once I went to the store to procure more English muffins (a trip I could have avoided had I merely checked the garage freezer). While at the store, I also bought more coffee filters, after reading this blog post on The Artful Parent about coffee filter spider webs for Halloween decoration. Birdie really loves her some cutting of coffee filters, and not being certain we had any (I use reusable ones for my daily brew), I figured I’d pick up some more. $1.29 investment that is unlikely to go to waste.

She wandered in as the adults wrapped up their meal, and I directed her to the coffee filters. She dove in, pulling out the scissor bin, and setting to making webs that looked remarkably like the snowflakes of last winter. We reread the blog post. The crafty member of our friend-set secured her own pair of scissors, and before long, she and Birdie had the hang of spider webs. Bird got distracted, though, by the idea of ghosts.

She turned to stuffing one filter into another and tying up their necks with twist ties, thereby clearing out my stash. I brought a needle and thread to the table and stitched up a ghostie garland. Husband attempted a very detailed spider before he and the crafter’s husband took off to play football in the perfect fall air.

Birdie went out for a bit, as well, but drifted back to the table several times over the late morning and early afternoon before she and our friend had covered the kitchen window with decorations. Googly-eyed pipe cleaner spiders, coffee filter spider webs, and a choir of ghosts filled every pane above the dog’s level.

While I’m sure that some of this would have happened at some point anyway, I love that it became a family affair, surrounding Birdie with people who love her and love doing things with her. Except Eliot, who was very very busy.

so this is the new year….

and I am full of thoughts & plans & resolutions.

I know that for many people, the first of the year represents nothing more than another day, but I work very well with arbitrary deadlines & dates for doing new things. Also, for me, the first of 2011 represented the end of one job and the beginning of a new job: one that permits me a significant, almost unbearable, amount of freedom in terms of the whens/wheres/hows of doing the work (which is, like the former job, fundraising and grantwriting).  With the freedom comes responsibility, isn’t that what is said?  For me, the responsibilities lie in:

1. accomplishing the actual work

2. taking advantage of freedom to write more: for myself, in my journal, and here.

3. exercising consistently & to the greatest ability of my body

4. investing time and energy in activities that the children will enjoy: story time, library trips, play dates, art projects, etc.

We have already been to the library story time at the Downtown Public Library (where we wanted to be married, but they, alas, don’t do weddings); Eliot got a bit fidgety after a while, and then he enjoyed roaming the stacks, playing with the puppets, etc.  I’m glad we get some time together, just like Bird & I did back when she was small.  Soon, we’ll register both for swim lessons, a nice prep for the summer I know is coming, even as we shiver through these winter days.

For me, also, the new year gives me a nice start to an activity that also helps prepare me for the year to come: the New Year Grand Plan Cleaning Challenge, wherein I will go room by room, pretty much exhaustively cleaning each space and, simultaneously, purging extra and unneeded items.  Every time I feel overwhelmed by drawer clutter or what feels like heaps of toys, I remind myself that in just a few weeks that annoyance will have been cleared away and remedied.  My best friend comes to visit in February & we’ll sit down and purge the purged things!  I can’t wait to have someone help me separate myself from the toys to which I am emotionally attached even when the children could not care less!

So, here we are, 9 days in to the new year, and I have been diligent, thus far, at my new intentions, while the new job so far seems like a good fit.  To record them for posterity, my 2011 starts with the phrase Be Kind, Be Patient, Be Creative.

It also includes striving to do the following:

1. observe daily devotionals
2. write daily, whether creative, blogging, journal, or letter writing
3. perform monthly breast self-exams.  Early detection saves lives & as the daughter & granddaughter of cancer survivors, I should be more diligent
4. plan and prepare three meals a week: these will probably be one chicken/turkey, one vegetarian, and one vegan.
5. do one weekly activity with the children that involves their interests: art project or a trip to the library or an excursion somewhere fun
6. maintain exercise routines in the fall.  I do fine in winter, spring, and summer, but fall.  Oh, fall.

So, that’s our new year.  What’s yours?