by Yesterday I posted a cute video of Charlotte singing along to an animal song. Eric and I sat there smiling at each other and marveling in our beautiful little family unit. If someone took a photo of all three of us at that moment I would have put it on Facebook or Instagram. #Blessed. #LoveMyFamily #AllTheCornyHashtags. Everyone would scroll on their own social media accounts and like or double tap and show us love.
It. Is. Not. Real. Life.
Do you want to know what was happening a half an hour before that video was taken and posted to my Facebook? I was yelling at Charlotte for hiding the baby monitor and pouring powder on the floor. Eric and I were ripping the house apart looking for the aforementioned baby monitor. Charlotte was refusing to eat dinner and screaming for Maya the Bee. I then instructed Eric to look in the garbage for the baby monitor, and as I ripped the couch cushions apart I listened to the sounds of my husband vomiting into the garbage. Actual vomit. And then we found the baby monitor ON THE FLOOR UNDER A TOY. And then we had a nightmare of a bath in which more water was on the floor than in the tub, and then she peed on me and tracked pee around the house. And then she cried at bedtime, and again at 8:45, and was up from 2:30-5. Hashtag blessed my asshole.
That’s real life people. The moments that don’t get displayed on social media for all the world to see. But maybe if we showed a little more of puking in a garbage can looking for a baby monitor and losing your cool with your toddler because they threw your car keys in the toilet, we wouldn’t be so programmed to think the families you see out there on Facebook and Instagram are perfect and yours isn’t. The hashtags and the filters are only showing the tiniest snippets of family life. They’re not showing the fights and the tears and the pure life altering exhaustion that being a mother and having a family is. But maybe it should, because then we’d all know we’re all going through the same thing. Maybe your husband isn’t throwing up into the garbage on a Tuesday night looking for a hidden baby monitor, but you know what I mean.
#GiveMeCoffeeOrGiveMeDeath
The Mommy Minutes 
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