January 2, 2021
You’ve heard the saying, parents. “The days are long, but the years are short”. I decided a couple days ago that Winter Break is basically an analogy to the parenting years when your kids are little, but just in a super compressed time period. “The days are long, but the break flew by!”. We veer back and forth between the magic of the holidays – the excitement of Christmas morning, the joy in our children’s eyes to breaking up fights, trying (and failing) to control screen and tv time, handling the “I’m boreds”. We love the extra time with our kids to go for walks or bike rides, but at the same time, we are dying over here because even on breaks (just like weekends), small children do not understand how to sleep in. Spoiler alert – my 7 year old is still the first one up. We revel in the magic of baking cookies with each other, but why do kids make such a mess? That I have to clean up? We get so excited to teach them how to build Legos or play a game we played as kids, but then we find that we are the only ones building the Legos and the instructions are 10 pages long. The only thing that really aligns for me is New Year’s Eve – we can all celebrate the new year early so I can still make my 10PM bedtime. I feel like, at the end of the day, Winter Break is just another fun game we all play as parents, trying to enjoy and soak up every magical minute with our kids, while in the next moment, trying desperately to distract them enough to get one minute alone with your own adult self (enter: guilt).
I’ve also realized that parenting in Winter Break is also an analogy for parenting in a pandemic. We’ve been bombarded with social media posts and messages for the last 10 months about the silver linings of the pandemic. “More time with my family!” “Soaking up these moments with my babies!” Pictures of families in their PJs, smiling for the camera in a disheveled yet perfect way, families playing games, cuddling in bed, making new recipes in the kitchen together, all with hashtags of #pandemicliving #lovemyfamily #soakingupthesemoments #onlypositives – you’ve seen it, you know it. But aren’t we all guilty of those posts? I sure am, and honestly, I have had many legitimate moments throughout the last 10 months when this true and I feel it. But it struck me the other day – this is exactly what we do over the holidays, too. It’s just exhausting. Where does this desire for everyone else to see our imperfect selves portrayed as perfectly perfect come from? Just who are we competing with and what are we trying to prove? Does it really matter if I baked my own cookies this year or relied solely on all the cookies I received from my sweet preschool families as my Christmas cookies? PS: The answer is NO, I relied only on your cookies and also I felt horribly guilty for not baking cookies with my own children because that’s what I did with my mom and what kind of traditions am I actually passing down to my own kids and what if they never prioritize making Christmas cookies with their families and end up all alone?????
Here’s a much needed reminder – to you and also for me: pictures on Facebook or Insta don’t make us present and engaging parents, just like dreaming of or actually taking the time to do things for ourselves do not make us bad parents (I would argue just the opposite instead).
At the end of the day, there is no filter we can put on our actual life that prevents God from seeing us exactly how we are. We can compete with each other or with ourselves, succumb to outside pressures, but God sees us as our most imperfect versions of ourselves. He sees the tears, the shouts, the anger, the things we wish we could take back but we can’t. He sees us in our moments of weakness and is the one who wraps his arms around us to pull us back up. He still loves us through the good and bad parenting moments, through the rough times and the silver linings, and through Winter Breaks and pandemics. God helps make these days longer because we will remember them – and makes these breaks and years shorter so we can savor them. This brings me comfort in my all too frequent moments of “am I being a good mom” panic. I hope it brings you comfort, too.
Happy New Year!