The Myth of Having it ALL together

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I was pregnant with my first child and made an incredibly reasonable decision:

I was going to be the perfect mother.

Obviously.

I was going to make all of my own baby food. Exclusively breastfeed. Be present and involved. Volunteer for everything. Keep an organized house. Do adorable crafts with my children.

You know the mom.

The internet mom.

Except when my oldest daughter was born, I was 28 years old and, in a lot of ways, still figuring out how to be an adult myself.

I had one really close friend, and I desperately wanted to find my people. Eventually, I found an outdoor workout class for moms and their kids. I joined, and somehow ended up with this little group of women whose kids were all around the same age.

And I watched them.

Some worked. Some were crafty DIY moms. Some knew everything about ingredients and what they fed their kids. Some seemed effortlessly organized. Everyone seemed to have figured out something that I didn’t.

So, naturally, I decided I would just take a little bit of each of them.

A little of her organization. Her creativity. Her nutrition. Her patience.

Surely if I collected enough of the best pieces of everyone else, I could cobble together one perfectly well-rounded mother.

Me.

That was the goal, anyway.

Or at least to get as close as possible to whatever I thought “perfect” looked like.

Then I had my second child.

And that really threw a wrench in the operation.

Turns out, keeping everything organized with one kid was significantly easier than doing it with two. Suddenly, my carefully laid plans, DIY projects, organization, and Type- A tendencies went straight out the window.

We were in survival mode.

And survive we did.

Eventually, my daughters got a little older and life started to feel manageable again. Slowly, I found my way back to doing all of those things I thought the “perfect mom” was supposed to do.

I baked homemade treats. I volunteered in the classroom. I made individual gifts for teachers. I worked occasionally.  I was even classroom mom.

I was doing it.

Or at least, I looked like I was.

And the strange thing is, I genuinely enjoyed a lot of it. Those things gave me joy and purpose.

But underneath all of it, something still felt slightly off.

I was doing everything I thought a good mother was supposed to do.

I just wasn’t entirely sure how much of it was actually me.

I was 34 when I had my twins.

THAT shook me.

Let me tell you, doubling the number of children you have overnight is a wild, wild ride. (More on that another day. Trust me, there are stories.).

Suddenly, there simply weren’t enough hours- or enough of me- to keep doing all the things.

Volunteering at school? Not happening.

Working more than one day a week? Absolutely not.

DIY projects? If Target or Amazon sold it, we were buying it.

And somewhere in all of that chaos, something started to happen.

I became really bad at being perfect.

I was messy. Forgetful. Disorganized. I could barely call the twins by the correct names. The girls left homework at home. I forgot permission slips. Text messages went unanswered. Emails disappeared into the abyss.  

If something wasn’t directly in front of me and crucial to the exact moment I was living in, there was a pretty good chance it wasn’t happening.

At first, I think I saw all of that as failure.

But eventually, I started to wonder if maybe the problem wasn’t that I was failing at motherhood.

Maybe the problem was the version of motherhood I’d been trying so hard to succeed at.

Around the twins’ first birthday, life felt complicated in ways that went far beyond the laundry pile. My marriage was struggling. I was exhausted. And the version of myself I’d spent years trying to construct was starting to crack.

I began to realize that I was chasing a level of perfection I was never going to reach.

I was never going to be the perfect wife.

I was never going to be the perfect mother.

I was never going to be the perfect nurse.

And I certainly wasn’t going to become the perfect version of me while spending so much time trying to be everyone else.

My life was chaotic. It was messy and disorganized and exhausting. I got overwhelmed. I stressed about things that probably didn’t deserve nearly as much of my energy as I gave them. I carried too much on my shoulders and sometimes I didn’t handle any of it particularly well.

But somewhere along the way, I started to realize something:

None of those things made me a failure.

They just made me a person.

By 36, I was finally starting to embrace the parts of myself I’d spent years trying to fix.

I realized I didn’t have to be Type A about everything just because my best friend was. I could absolutely make a color-coded calendar because that is where MY Type A likes to live.

But I didn’t have to organize every corner of my life.

I didn’t have to DIY something I could buy.

I didn’t have to volunteer for everything.

I didn’t have to prove that I was a good mother by how much I could accomplish.

I could just be me.

I could read smutty novels because they brought me joy instead of convincing myself I should be reading self-help books.

I could order take out.

I could forget a permission slip, leave a text unanswered, serve cereal for dinner, and still be a good mom.

Sometimes it was okay to just survive.

It was okay to be who I am instead of constantly trying to become some more organized, productive, polished version of her.

Thank goodness I started learning that lesson when I did.

Because about six months before my 38th birthday, I found myself a single mother of four going through a messy divorce.

 And divorce does not exactly lend itself to having your shit together.

Nothing about my life looked perfect.

It was complete and utter chaos.

And strangely?

I was okay.

Somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, I realized just how many years I’d spent trying to make it look like I had everything together.

I had spent so much energy trying to become the perfect mother, wife, nurse, friend- whatever the moment required- that somewhere along the way, I’d stopped asking whether any of it actually felt like me.

Giving myself permission to be human- to be messy, imperfect, overwhelmed, unfinished-  gave me a kind of freedom I didn’t even know I’d been missing.

For the first time in a very long time, I could breathe.

These days, people will sometimes say things like, “I don’t know how you do it with four kids” or, my personal favorite, “You make it look so easy”.

It isn’t.

And I’m perfectly happy to tell them that.

I’ll tell them about the appointment that was literally written in my planner that I still managed to forget because I scheduled a playdate and mixed up the times.

Ill joke- although I’m only partially joking- that taking four kids anywhere in public feels like going on tour with a traveling circus.

My coworkers will comment on how cheerful I am at work, and I’ll remind them that sometimes eight hours at the hospital feels suspiciously like a vacation because nobody is asking me for a snack or yelling “MOM!” from another room.

My life still isn’t particularly organized.

I still forget things.

I still get overwhelmed.

There are still days when the laundry is everywhere, dinner comes in a takeout container, somebody needs something I forgot about, and I’m fairly certain I’m disappointing a least one person.

The difference is that I don’t see those things as evidence that I’m doing life wrong anymore.

For years- I looked at other woman- first the moms around me and eventually the carefully curated version of people we see online- and collected little pieces of who I thought I was supposed to be.

More organized like her.

More involved like her.

More patient. More productive. More put together.

More everything.

It took me a long time to realize that I was never supposed to become all of them.

I was supposed to become me.

And apparently, she’s a little messy.

She forgets permission slips.

She reads smutty books.

She orders takeout.

She loves her children fiercely and occasionally considers going to work a vacation.

She doesn’t have it all together.

And she finally stopped trying to.

Because maybe the goal was never to arrive at some perfectly organized version of life where everything finally falls into place.

Maybe the good stuff has been happening all along- somewhere between the plans that worked and the ones that completely fell apart.

In the messy parts.

The unfinished parts.

The parts where we’re still figuring out who we are.

Right here in the beautiful middle.