I had another blog before this one. Nearest and Dearest it was called. It was an attempt to record the life of our growing family and for a few years it did just that.
Then life got hard.....
It's great to share when you are doing fun things and your kids are cute and life is smooth. It gets harder to share when the days look dark and bleak, when you are not sure how you will make it through the next hour, let alone the next 12 hours. When you long to crawl in bed and sleep to forget. When you wake up and think this is not what I signed on for.
When the picture isn't perfect.........
I think so many of us hide. In a social media driven society, we always put our best foot foward. We don't post the selfie that is unflattering. We talk about our kid's A's and sports accomplishments. We don't talk about the times when we worry that we are not doing this right, when we see things in our children that are unflattering.
I get it. People don't want to read depressing news or complaints. But maybe that is the problem because we were not designed to live our lives on Facebook or Instagram. We were designed to live life in community, sharing our joy and our troubles.
The trouble is that our community has become social media. Don't get me wrong, I love staying in touch with others and seeing their pictures and hearing about their lives but I find lately that I connect so much less on a personal level with people. I measure my life in "likes" instead of genuine conversation.
I want to be at the place where along with my perfectly posed family beach picture, I can show that "other" picture, the one that shows us not as I wish we would be or think we should be but as we are and know that I still will be accepted and loved.
I have missed blogging and authenticity and I want to return to that. This blog is my attempt at that and my acknowledgemnt that the picture isn't perfect but it is mine.
