A fly on the wall

"Finally, in reply to Jen's comment - YES Lisa is AMAZING - the house is always clean, the kids great, etc. I know I always feel like I must be doing something wrong when I can't keep my 2 kids under control and my house clean!"

My good friend, Lisa B., left this comment on my other blog.


Sigh.


It's just not true. I know this is said from love, but it makes me feel like a fraud. Why do people think this about me? It's a rare day that I truly feel like Super Mom. Most days I feel like I'm failing in more ways than one, and every single day I start the day off vowing to be a better mom than I usually end up being.

My house is not always clean. I am fortunate enough to have a housekeeper who comes once a week and does all the heavy cleaning: mopping, vaccuuming, cleaning the bathrooms, dusting, etc. (okay, she breaks things and lies about it too, but let's not go there right now). Aside from that, the kids trash the house every day. There are usually toys and books and games littered across the floor from the playroom to the bedrooms to the living room. I am an anal retentive control freak, that is true. So I do make sure that things mostly get picked up by the end of the day (so they can start the whole mess over the next day of course). But it's just not true that my house is always clean, and for some reason a lot of my friends have this misconception. Also, my kids are not always great. They're at heart all good kids (well, except for Annabelle who I am convinced is the spawn of the Devil), but they fight and bicker and whine and talk back and do all the bratty things that everyone else's kids do. And I yell. You could reasonably call me Old Yeller. I yell and I use ridiculous threats ("If you don't stop that right now, I'm never going to feed you again!" . . . and then I have to remind myself that by law I must feed them . . .). And I spank. Which I was never ever going to do. (And by spank I mean giving a good solid swat to the butt, not beating the crap out of them with a belt or kitchen utensil like my own parents did . . . but I digress.) There are days that I become so overwhelmed and frustrated by this whole mom thing that I close myself in the bathroom and cry (I don't know why I bother with the bathroom - the kids just barge right in usually). When I see Michael's car pull into the driveway every evening, I swear I come close to crying actual tears of relief.

Anyway, my house is like everyone else's house pretty much. It might be true that I put my best foot forward when other people are here, and maybe that's where the impression of Super Mom comes from. But if you could be a fly on the wall in my house for a day, you would quickly see the truth of the matter.