It’s Monday again. I must be Real.

I don’t know about the choice of Monday as the Ministry of Reality blogging day.  It’s Monday.  After Sunday.  The day when all brains in this house close up shop and hang up the sign, “Gone Fishin’.”  Though, maybe that makes it the best day for my reflections on reality.

Part of the Ministry of Reality blog project, as I see it anyway, is to counteract–I suppose counterbalance is a kinder word, or more neutral word–counterbalance those really pretty MomBlogs where all of life goes so smoothly, the children do all their chores, the mom does all the cooking and sewing and baking and still finds time to exercise and knit and volunteer three-thousand hours a week and color her hair a shiny shade of blond using all natural ingredients she grows herself in her backyard sustainable garden that grows enough to feed the orphans downtown.  Or something like that.

Those blogs evoke in me a whirlwind of envy and shame and annoyance and covetousness and laziness and shame and, most of all, exhaustion.  So, that can’t be healthy, hunh?

I like to think my blog has never crossed the line into that level of pressure.  I don’t see how it could.  In that way, this Ministry of Reality Monday is a little tricky, given the fact that my life is very real already.  My house is a mess–all the time–my children beat each other on a regular basis, watch far too much TV, have eaten far too many hot dogs in the last month, I don’t think I, personally, have done a load of laundry or cooked a meal in weeks.  Now, mind you, my husband has been off from work for several weeks, so don’t worry, we’re not starving.  On the contrary, we’re surviving quite well on a steady diet of buttermilk Belgian waffles, buttermilk pancakes, Nutella-filled ebelskiver, ganache-filled-chocolate-buttercream-frosted chocolate cupcakes, ganache-topped chocolate cake, and various grilled meats.  We’re fine.

So, what’s a girl to talk about to make a Monday more real than the other six days of the week?  Well, I think mostly, for me anyway, it’s a good opportunity to just stop and think and realize that life is life.  Life can be difficult, life can be fun, life can be pretty and life can be ugly.  I don’t have to always be on top of everything, I don’t have to run a perfect little household machine here.  Because my household is made up of people.  And people are messy.  On all sorts of levels.

So, today, instead of looking around my house and lamenting over what a mess it is, going through my daily–sometimes hourly–”I’m So Bad at this Homemaking Thing” song and dance, wasting my energy trying to live up to some crazy, external standard, I’ll just look around at my cute kids and my handsome husband and revel in the fun we have together and the love we share and enjoy the adventure we’re on.