It's Okay

Dinner tonight is a coffee icecream soda/iced coffee/mudslide something or other that I just concocted. I like the idea of it, but I think I could figure out a better recipe. Oh, and I did eat the boy's curly pasta in tomato sauce, since he didn't. So, I suppose that could count as my real dinner.

Now the monkey boy and the Ivy bean are both asleep. If I am lucky, they will continue to be so. It's raining like crazy and the ozone scented breeze is whipping through the apartment. Thunder and Lightning.

Today was hard. Not because of the day-- so the kids tag teamed me again, one waking just as I put the other down for a nap, so I had no break, so what. The hard-ness of the day came from me. All me. I keep seeing all the things that I am not doing right. (Like eating well. Witness: today's dinner.) I keep thinking of how I should be a better mother or a better housekeeper, or a better mate or a better friend or a better sister/daughter/self. At least I could be a better writer. And I don't see the things that are going right, even if I know there's no wrong or right in the situation, there's just what it is.

I know I should work on my perspective, my attitude towards it all, and then I would feel better, wouldn't beat myself up over everything. I know this all because it's pretty typical behavior of mine to be a negative perfectionist. The problem is, I'm just too dad-blasted tired to work on my attitude.

So today, I read a million blogs. Mommy blogs and crafty blogs and writer blogs and city blogs and sometimes they were all four. And I read my blog too, going back to the beginning even, when I first started blogging many years ago. Years go by in a flash!

I'm not quite sure how all those other people with blogs manage to get an audience. I think I was starting to get one, before, with my old blog, but once the kiddos came along, I just didn't have the head space to be marketing my little blog. So my blogs remained something kind of private, something kind of like talking to myself, although someone may stumble across them every once in a while.

But atleast I get something out of them. While I was talking to myself and reading my archived ramblings, I noticed a pattern. Each time I gave birth, I went for two whole months without posting anything. Then I noticed and improvement on the pattern. With this baby, I was back writing and posting after those two months were done. The last time, I posted once or twice a month, and was completely unproductive artistically... or so I complained.

This time around, I am absolutely without a doubt tired, but I am not creatively exhausted, just energetically so. And I know also that I will get back to myself. Things will get better.

It also helped that some of the other writer and creative mom bloggers went through the same frustration when they first were struggling with their children.

So I'm going to ramble a little bit longer and say to myself that it is okay if I am not the perfect mom. It's okay if the house is a wreck and G won't eat proper meals and if we don't get out of the house to give the little man playground time every day. It's okay if my book is taking forever to revise. It's okay if I am exhausted or sad or too tired to get up and run around. It's simply okay. It'll come back. Everyone is getting what they need, if not much more than that right now. There will be time later to be productive and exuberant. It's okay for me, and it's okay for any other new mom who might be in the same situation and come astumbling upon this blog.

It's okay.

And it's time for me to go and watch So You Think You Can Dance, and that's okay, too. More than okay. I love them all so much, I don't want anyone to go home. But that's not okay, because someone is going to have to go. Oh, well. It's still fun times to watch.