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You know those beautiful pictures on Pinterest and Instagram and those Lifestyle Blogs that tell you how to do it right, you know how you drool over those on Sunday mornings so that you run out to your local hardware store and buy gallons of paint or go to the nearest boutique and try to find that perfect accessory that you know will make that outfit pop. You drive by yard sales trying to find that armoire to restore in antique patina. Only it ends up in the garage looking more moth eaten than vintage.
The lives portrayed through those perfectly focused lenses are not the full story. They are just milliseconds, glimpses shared with us of a much richer life behind the camera. I hope there is more to the tale. I hope behind the clean, oh, so enviably clean, living room, there is a messy family that laughs and argues and makes up and lives.
I hope behind the perfect outfit there is a woman who is loved and loves and is flawed in all the ways that matter and don’t matter to someone important in her life. I hope we understand that there is more to her than the prettiness on the outside, that there is so much more beauty on the inside.
Someone out there might have that perfect life. I don’t know. I only live my own little perfectly lovely but slightly messy one. I can only live it the ways I know how and though I get in those moods where the paint cans take over the house and the wardrobe all gets a Spring clean, I know that I’m living my life in ways that are full and wonderful. I know that my family is happy and doesn’t miss any of the important things. Actually, I know that we have many things besides that too. Most of us do if we are honest with ourselves and stop wanting more.
I have to make sure that when I look at those perfect pictures I wonder if the children and the houses and the rooms and the things we see are getting filtered the right way in our minds. I wonder if we realize that our lives are made up of so many wonderful, awesome moments that if seen from the outside can sometimes be seen as those perfect filtered moments. But more often they are those crazy moments right before the picture gets taken when everyone is halfway ready, when all faces are off kilter. More often we are in a state of construction, not perfect but getting there.