Oh, Saturday!

Friday night, I waited up until midnight for my oldest daughter to get home from her high school homecoming dance. These days, I'm usually lucky to still be awake by 10pm, so midnight was tough. I was super glad I didn't have to set the alarm for any specific Saturday morning hour and, indeed, I rolled out of bed just after 9:00am that morning.

I sat down at the kitchen table and scrolled through Facebook while I ate a bowl of cereal and savored a cup of coffee. Scrolling across my computer screen were friends who were, at 9:30am, already out and about walking for breast cancer, anticipating a busy soccer tournament, had already slayed a workout, or  were photographing the colors of fall foliage.

As I sat there in my pajamas with a bowl of cold cereal and a cup of lukewarm coffee, I lamented the Saturday ahead of me. We had no plans for adventure or excitement. Instead, I knew that my Saturday would be spent with three kids who probably wouldn’t let their feet hit the floor until almost noon, a husband who would spend all morning in his office upstairs woking while I toiled away scrubbing tubs and toilets, doing load after load of laundry, vacuuming up dog hair, trying to plan our menu for the coming week, and attempting to order groceries without blowing the budget.

Sounds super glamorous, no?

I let myself wallow in that self-pity for a little while. Then, I remembered that I've really been trying hard to break up with "busy" and how nice it was that I didnt’ have to set the alarm when I went to bed the night before. It occurred to me that all those moms sitting out there on a cool drizzly soccer field might very well have preferred being curled up back in bed  or at least being at home sipping a cup of coffee in their pajamas. Maybe the people who were out walking for a cause or exercising bright and early were dreading the dirty house they were going to have to tackle later in the day.

Certainly, there are those who pray daily to know what their next meal might be and how they will pay to feed their children tomorrow -much less have a menu for an entire week and a “budget” to think about.

But, nobody posts those kind of things in a Facebook feed, do they?

No one would tell the world how mundane their life is or talk about all the things they are NOT for all their social media “friends” to see - becasue who would want to read that, right?

Better yet, who would want to admit that they are simply average??

Well, maybe I would. For the sake of myself and anyone else who is feeling the way I felt Saturday morning about my lackluster, boring, completely un-glamorous Saturday morning, this was how I spent my Saturday morning:

I share this because I think we all feel a lot of pressure to construct these perfect, interesting lives because that's what we think is expected of us based on what we see on social media. We forget that social media is not always reality - or at least not the WHOLE picture of reality - and, somehow, we've come to believe that a humdrum Saturday is something to be embarrassed about. I would argue, however, that the "humdrum" parts of our lives are where we find most of our commonalities and that, really, we could probably all use a little less busy and a lot more "humdrum."

So, I say . . . . 

Kudos to the parents who were on the soccer field or at the dance team competition at the crack of dawn.
Kudos to the women who had already run five miles before 8am.
Kudos to the family who packed up the minivan for a weekend in the mountains or at the beach.
Kudos to the dads who made chocolate chips pancakes with preschoolers before the sun came up.

And you know what?

Kudos to the mom who was still in her pajamas at 11am sipping her third cup of coffee.
Kudos to the teenagers who didn’t get out of bed before noon and to the parents who let them sleep.
Kudos to the dads who worked in the morning and give it their all to provide for a family.
Kudos to the kids who lazed on the couch watching Paw Patrol in Elsa pajamas.
Kudos to the mamas who, just like me, spent the morning scrubbing toilets and folding towels.

In the end, we’re all just trying to make this family life work - whetever that might look like for each one of us and we would probably all be better off if we paid a little a lot less attention to what we see on social media and just kept on keeping on with whatever works for us.

What does your typical Saturday look like? 


SaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave