I Hope You Break a Leg

I've noticed a trend lately in scrapbookers getting discouraged about their motherhood skills. From the blogs I've read, they feel as if they are the only ones who get mad, who have kids who do stuff that gets mommy mad, who don't have perfectly clean houses, who don't change the sheets and wash the car once a week.

I blame internet scrapbook galleries for this.

I Hope You Dance, Dream Big, You Inspire Me. Pages of angels who behave perfectly and even the few times they do mess up their mommies laugh and take pictures and post how cute they are instead of actually getting mad about it. So we read this journaling and we start to think that this is normal life. That the world is populated with everyone else's baby darlings and your holy terrors. It's easy to assume that you are the only one with a messy house buying McDonald's food and neglecting the bedding when all you read is stories from Rose-Colored-Glasses Land. You start to think it's abnormal to be angry when your child cuts her own hair the night before your brother's wedding.

Now, I'm not advocating that scrapbookers all turn cynical and negative and dwell on the embarrassing and bad parts of motherhood. Just that we be a bit more rounded in our renditions. The internet galleries can make us all a bit too aware of our broader audience. It's easy to get caught up in writing our journaling for everyone else. Saying what we think we should say instead of what we really want to say or what we really feel.

Journaling should be more personal than that. It should be written for you and your family. You shouldn't do a page about how much you love your family because Rebecca Sower says you should. You should do it because at that moment when you look at that picture that's what you feel. What's wrong with a page that says "do you remember how mad I got when you did that?" If we are writing our family's history, shouldn't it be the real history?

Disclaimer: No, I don't really believe that hanging out on scrapbook galleries is making all scrapbookers need Zoloft. I do think I have seen a few too many "Angel" pages. I did intend for this to be funny, but that's not how it came out this morning.