Keeping it Real

Today, I wanted to write a blog post about reality. It might be a boring, uninspirational post, but that's okay because, on the whole, my life is not dripping with color or achievement. It's steeped in the lukewarm mundanity that lingers in the background and often the foreground from waking to sleeping.

Today, I made banana bread. That sounds really homemaker-y and might be incredible to some, but the real reason there are two loaves of banana bread cooling on my counter is that I bought bananas, didn't eat the bananas, and then made banana bread so I didn't have to feel guilty about throwing them away.

Today, I went to the gym. We did an upper-body workout. I surprised myself by holding a 50-second plank with a hundred-pound sandbag on my back. That might sound really impressive, but I wanted to make it 60 seconds and I didn't quite get there.

Today, the weather is over 50 degrees. It's sunny and there's no wind. I thought about taking my kids to the park, but I was so tired from the week of workouts and reduced sleep quality that I laid in bed for two hours watching Hulu while the baby napped.

Today, I watched the children in childcare at the gym for an hour. There were toys everywhere, at least one person was crying the whole time, and at the end of the hour, I went home. I unbuckled the kids from their car seats. I helped a neighbor unload some sheetrock from his truck. I checked the mail.

And tomorrow, I will wake up and I will do the same things again. I'll bake something. I'll probably do a burpee or a pushup (or 50), I'll drive kids to school and pick them up again and do dishes and make some sort of dinner and budget the dollars and maybe buy some groceries.

And something in the back of my mind will tell me that this is unexceptional. That the things I do are not even ripples in the pond.

Some of you reading this might want at this point to say, "But you are exceptional! Look at all the amazing stuff you've done!"

But here's the thing: sometimes worthwhile stuff is unexceptional. Sometimes it's not impressive. Often, it's uncomfortable, awkward, ugly, unpleasant, or mind-numbingly dull. The answer to the question, "How was your weekend?" might mostly be a shrug, or a non-commital "Fine, and yours?" because my weekend consisted mostly of breaking up kids' arguments and checking the tracking data on a package that still hasn't come.

In a time when everything is made to be shown off (bodies, baking, clothes, kids, houses, etc.), take a moment to reflect on the things that are not worth showing off -- they might be your biggest accomplishments. My first 9 batches of failed macarons, the endless nights of no sleep holding a sick child, the daily green smoothie that I drink even though it actually tastes awful, the calluses on my hands from trying and still not succeeding at doing a pull-up.

Sometimes the biggest accomplishment of them all is not something you can post on Instagram. It's this fact: In the face of the mundane and uninteresting things that fit like millions of grains of sand among the few flashy pearls on the necklace of your life, you haven't quit. I might not have a glamorous life, but I have a real life.

Some perfectly mundane seaweed that nobody would normally take a picture of, but I did obviously.