I Didn’t Make the Cake

By Megan

I called my Mom earlier this week, just as she was wrapping up a luncheon she hosted for a couple of her friends. Mom entertains often and always does it up Martha Stewart-style with fabulous all-homemade food and decorations perfectly arranged around the appropriate seasonal theme. If y’all’re going to lunch at Mom’s, you should prepare to be dazzled. The woman’s a perfectionist and the hardest worker I know. Her hands are never idle for long; her mind’s constantly in planning mode. And although I doubt I’ll ever attain her level of artistry and industry in my lifetime, I am, in many ways, cut from the same 100% cotton, yarn-dyed Waverly print cloth.

On the phone, we debriefed the details of the luncheon, my mouth watering as she described the menu. By the time she got to dessert, I’d already gained 3 lbs. from my spot nearly 1000 miles away. And then she said, “I didn’t make the cake.”

Pause.

“I’ve spent my life trying to be perfect, driving myself crazy wanting to impress, out-do and one-up everyone in everything I do. It’s time for me to just relax and enjoy PEOPLE. So I didn’t make the cake. I went down to Publix and bought one.”

People! Are you hearin’ me? She didn’t make the cake. And the world? It’s still goin’ around. And that’s a life lesson this uptight, stressed-out, beatin’-herself-up new mother of two needed desperately.

I’ve been walking around lately with all the muscles in my shoulders and back in knots, my head a-throb and my eyebrows screwed up in a pretzel as I’ve tried to do it all and do it perfectly – the kids, the house, the husband, the finances, the blogs — all of it. As each day has ended I’ve reluctantly climbed into my bed exhausted, frustrated, and even angry over the “important” details that didn’t fall into perfect place. The baby who wouldn’t nap anywhere but in my arms or in the front-carrier. The preschooler who splattered wet, gooey chalk dust all over her face, hair and clothes. Spots on the carpet, dishes in the sink, laundry left overnight in the dryer. Four days gone with no new posts on my blog.

And I’ve allowed these things to eat away at my self-worth and stir up bitter resentment against my own precious kids and husband for disrupting my carefully-ordered, meticulous little life and causing my household to fall into relative chaos.

But thanks to Mom I’ve realized that darn it, now’s the time for me to just relax and enjoy PEOPLE. My people. To scoop up and hold that sweet-smelling, soft, snuffly-snorgly baby boy close to me, where he wants and needs to be, even if it means I can’t empty the dishwasher or Dust Bust under the kitchen table right now. Time to look past the pink and purple litter of discarded socks, sippy cups, My Little Pony accessories and a million scraps of paper that would normally drive me half-crazy until it was cleaned up and really take in my daughter’s beautiful silhouette glowing happily as she concentrates every ounce of effort on cutting pictures of Linus out of her Charlie Brown activity book and coloring him violet.

It’s time for me to give up perfection, as I define it or anyone else defines it, and let my tidy, ordered world get a little cluttered, a little dusty, a little disorganized. Time to eat off of paper plates, sleep on “dirty” sheets and leave those ittybitty prints on the glass for a few days so I can focus on what’s really important. The ittybitty little people who put ’em there.

Years from now, I hope I look back on these days and remember not what a perfect wife and mother I was to my family, but all the hours I spent really focusing on my children and my husband, realizing how perfect they are to me.

Find Megan writing at FriedOkra.