Stop the Madness

I haven't been blogging much lately, mostly because once again I lost my mind and thought it would be ok to take on a little too much, just for a couple of months. Lesson learned: stupid, stupid, stupid. And, in what I'm sure was a physical manifestation of my mental state, I ruptured a disc in my back and have been spending way too much time with doctors and physical therapists. It's been fun.

So for the holidays, I'm striving for balance by pulling out not one, but two time honored traditions here at Up With Moms -- relying on other people's content and running a re-run.

So here's a great holiday post, making the same point that I often do on this blog -- we are our own worst enemies. Go read this.

But before you do, read this holiday post that I wrote a couple of years ago which makes that same point. AND REMEMBER THIS FOR NEXT YEAR (which is more a reminder for me than it is for you.)

I'm Too Busy to Blog (originally posted December 3, 2008)

Well, it's the holidays and you know what that means. Time to pile a thousand more to-dos on top of the already unrealistic and overflowing list of to-dos.

I'm sure, like me, you're scouring the Internet for inexpensive holiday gifts for everyone you know and probably some people you hardly know but feel compelled to buy gifts for. And while you're trying oh-so hard to find gifts that are not too expensive because the economy has sucked the life out of your bank account, you're putting additional pressure on yourself to find gifts with meaning because that's what the holidays are truly about -- meaning. And you're scouring the Internet for holiday card deals, but not just any deals -- deals for recycled cards because it's all about being green. And you're trying to figure out how to upload your goddamn holiday picture with your lovely family and your fake smile into the photo card template which you now have spent WAY too much time on because you couldn't find just the right photo and then the photo you tried to use was too low-res so you had to redo it. AND because you don't have enough to do, you're about to bake four dozen homemade cookies for the neighborhood holiday cookie exchange because you're the freaking President of the freaking neighborhood Women's Club that you totally didn't have time to take on, but you did anyway for some ungodly reason. AND OF COURSE they can't be any old cookies, they have to be the ULTIMATE peanut butter cookies with the Reese's peanut butter cups in the middle that you bake in a mini-muffin pan because regular cookies just aren't freaking special enough, LIKE YOU DON'T HAVE A FULL TIME JOB ALREADY????!!!!!

Oh, wait. That could be just me.

Except I don't think it is just me. It's a sickness, I admit it. And you need to admit it too. When did we decide we had to be Martha Stewart with the perfect holiday card, giving out the perfect holiday gifts and serving up the perfect holiday fare? It's all a sham. Our lives are so not perfect yet every year we try to fool ourselves and each other into thinking that they are.

I loved this post on MommyTrak'd about living in a post-balance world and declaring 2009 the year of the un-balance. I'm all for that -- it's time we came out of the closet about our failures and frailties. I'll start. Hi, I'm Amy. And I'm completely unbalanced. See, it's easy. First step is admitting the problem. Second step is giving up the behavior. I know -- I could send my Christmas cards with a picture of the pee and poop piles that my dog and cat have been consistently leaving us around the house which would be a much more realistic depiction of our lives lately. And maybe I could show up to the cookie exchange with a bag of Oreos.

Maybe next year. Being a control freak with perfectionistic tendencies, it's that second step that'll trip me up.

Well at least I now have one thing off of my to-do list -- another blog post.

Stop the Madness