Everything's Not Awesome

I don’t know about your house, but mine has been taken over by all things Lego Movie 2. My older two boys have seen the movie, we have the Lego's (yay, marketing!), we listen to the songs every.single.day. You could say it is the “thing” of the moment around here.

There is a song in the movie that is supposed to get stuck in your head. It literally has the line “this song is going to get stuck inside your head”. However, that is not the song that got stuck in mine. Right now, I am in the middle of preparing to speak to a group of moms about motherhood. I am not totally sure I feel like I am the right person for the job but last week my mom said “why not? You are THIRTY-FIVE and have FOUR kids”. Thanks for the reminder, mom! So, as I think about motherhood, I keep thinking about a song from the Lego Movie 2.

It starts out with:

Everything's not awesome

Everything's not cool

I am so depressed

Everything's not awesome

Motherhood right now, anyone? Winter. Snow. Kids you can’t send outside. Health issues. Marriage in close quarters. Anyone? Please tell me I am not alone. I already wrote last month about given up. This is a rough season around here.

BUT that is not where the song ends and it isn’t how we have to live. It doesn’t have to be either totally awesome or totally not awesome. The song goes on (and this is the part I love)…

“Everything's not awesome

Things can't be awesome all of the time

It's an unrealistic expectation”

Did you catch it? Read it again. “Things can’t be awesome all of the time, that is an unrealistic expectation.” I 100% agree with that statement. It just isn’t how life works and if we want it to always be awesome we are going to be disappointed and that won’t feel awesome so we will be disappointed in our disappointed feelings and it becomes a WHOLE NOT AWESOME THING. GIVE UP! GO BACK TO BED! DON’T EVEN BOTHER WITH HAIR OR CLEAN PANTS. EVERYTHING IS NOT AWESOME!

STOP.

Read the next lines…

“But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try

To make everything awesome

In a less idealistic kind of way”

Oh, well, that is a different approach. We could try to make what we can awesome. We can just try our best. We can still try to be our best selves. We can wear clean pants. We can fix our hair pretty. We can get up before our kids to have some quiet space (I will harp on this until the day I die. It is my thing. Not even sorry.) We can try in a less idealistic kind of way. It won’t all be awesome. It just won’t. We don’t live in that made up world. We live here in the messy middle life. But we can still try to influence our families and world for good (or, for awesome) when and where we can.

And some days we need the last line of this verse….

“We should maybe aim for not bad

'Cause not bad right now would be real great”

Some days are going to be just shooting for “not bad”. Some days your husband will be out of town, and you will wake up to the sound of vomit, and then your husband’s flight will be delayed and you will end up sounding like Oprah after school…You get a Kindle and You get a Kindle and YOU get a Kindle and YOU get a snack and YOU get candy! And just give mommy a few minutes to pee alone! So we aim for not bad and that is real great right now.  We cut ourselves the slack we would cut our girlfriends and we make it through a less idealistic version of our day but feel awesome because we made it to bed that night.

One final point. The bridge of the song shares an idea of how to pull this less idealistic version of awesome off…”We can make things better if we stick together, side by side, you and I, we will build it together…”. Together. In community. Together with our spouse we can build an awesome family. Together with our friends we can build an awesome village. Going it alone rarely works. We can and need to depend on others. I ask my husband for help. We work together when things are not awesome to figure out how to get back to some version of awesome. We have even sought out help to do that. I have spent pretty much the entirety of my children’s lives seeking other mom’s (of all ages) to do this together. I support them and they support me. Building it together will ALWAYS make it more awesome!

So go be awesome, whatever that looks like, today!

My Shift

Do you ever look back and see that there was a particular day, that was supposed to be an ordinary day, where everything shifted? Everything in your whole life swerved in that moment? Where you don’t remember thing events that were supposed to be big, but you remember everything about the moment when your life shifted? Even if at the moment, you didn’t know it was actually going to be the shift?

I am not talking about large scale things like weddings, births, trauma, deaths. But where something small started the ball rolling. You didn’t know at the time what the outcome was going to be, but it turned out to be huge and it was all in that moment.

I have one of those. It is my most vivid shift in my life. It happened on January 18^th, 2012. It was exciting at the moment but I really didn’t know it was the shift until it all came to past.

My job that day was taking me to Washington, DC. Which was not out of the ordinary and something I did every couple of months. It was so routine, it was almost boring. I read a Sherlock Holmes book on the plane (I only know this from a Facebook memory quote).

The rest of what I was there for is a blur. I don’t remember the content of the strategy meeting we were having that day. I can’t remember a word of the lunch meeting I had that I had fought hard to get with an older guy in my field who I was hoping would mentor me some and give me tips. It was a score to get that lunch appointment. It was going to boost my career. I remember none of it because none of that matters today.

What I do remember from that day was this….

I had a few minutes to kill at my hotel that morning after dropping off my suitcase and before I had to get to a meeting. There is a Starbucks in the lobby so I got coffee and a snack and decided to make a quick phone call. A few days earlier I had learned of an adoption attorney who was opening her adoptive families list to new clients. We wanted to be on as many lists as possible so I was calling her paralegal to inquire about the process of getting on that list.

What began as an inquire call quickly changed when I said we wanted to adopt an African American boy. She got excited. She said they really needed a family to show an expected mother and they didn’t have anyone that fit. In that moment, I learned about my son. We went through the logistics of getting on her lists. She went a little outside of protocol and sent me the redacted intake paperwork so I could learn more about the baby. He was due in a month. I had to cut the call short with a promise to speak later so I could get to work. But the shift had happened.

I don’t remember any of the rest of the work day. I was thinking about this baby boy and how, just maybe, he could be ours. I am going to add here that I remember it was super stressful to be so far away from Mark and unable to get him even on the phone right then. Mostly I just wondered if I should get excited or play it cool. We had just had one failed matched but it is so hard not to get your hopes up about these things. I wanted to be a mom. Could this be it?

The next day I would fly home and the day after that we would drive to Gainesville, FL to meet the attorney and officially be on the list so our profile could be shown. A week later, we would get the call saying we were picked to be the baby’s parents. Two and a half weeks later, we would hold our son in our arms…that day and forever.

He will be seven in a few weeks. He changed my whole world. He was my shift. It all started on an ordinary January day and my life has never been the same and I am thankful for that every.single.day.

On How I Made My Birthday Awesome

When I was little, my mom did a great job of making birthdays super special. In our home, your birthday was definitely “your day”. I LOVED my birthday and looked forward to all the fun pretty much all year.

Then one day I woke up and I was the mom and I was the person making birthdays special and my birthday lost some of its shine. Beyond being the birthday person in my family, well, I still have all these kids and adulting to do…even on my birthday!!

In no way is this a slight against my husband. The man has tried to make it a special day, but I think even he was at a loss as to how to do that and, frankly, the guy is busy providing for our family and being a daddy.

So for the last few years, probably since I had kids, I haven’t loved my birthday, and that has brought some sadness to it. However, in the last couple of years I have been working on my voice and priorities and making this most of the life I have right here in front of me.

This year I applied all this to my birthday and I am sharing a few of those ideas here today. Just remember, these are the things that made my birthday awesome. This list should look unique to each mom.

1.  I am a gifts person. I like to give and receive gifts. In the case of my birthday, I like to give my people a list of ideas of things I want and I like to have wrapped gifts. But my husband doesn’t like to spend a lot of time shopping, shopping with kids isn’t fun, and he definitely doesn’t like to wrap presents. In the past, I have fretted about how he wasn’t shopping and it was almost my birthday, I would find the gifts stashed in various places unwrapped which was kind of disappointing. The gift part of my birthday wasn’t working. Instead of hoping that this year my husband would magically learn to read my mind and shop early for exactly what I had only hinted at and wrap it in amazing wrapping paper and display these gifts for me to “ohh” and “ahh” over, I stepped up my part…I sent him an email with links to Amazon for EXACTLY what I wanted. I pointed out to him that the kids can still be involved even if they are just clicking “buy now”. And he ordered it all to come gift wrapped!! It was my own bit of birthday magic to have all these beautiful gifts lined up on the mantel for the week before my birthday!

2. I stopped trying to do what other people say you should do for your birthday. I love my kids and I love caring for my kids and I love mornings. High on my list of things I don’t like is laying in bed listening while my poor husband tries to get them all fed and ready so mommy can “sleep in”. This year on my birthday I got up at my normal wake up time (it was a Sunday, so it was a little later than a week day, but my Sunday normal). I got the babies their morning milk. I helped prepare breakfast and dress kids for church. I didn’t leave it all to Mark because the world says mom needs the day off.

3.  I expressed clear and specific time expectations for my birthday, and then set up the babysitting myself. I knew what I wanted from the day, why shouldn’t I make the childcare arrangements? I wanted a trip out to lunch (which I specified as being at a favorite simple lunch place rather than a big “birthday lunch” at a fancier restaurant) and shopping with my husband at the mall. Before that, though, I wanted some time alone in my own house, because that is a rare event here. So, I just set up the expectation that I would help get the kids ready for church but would not attend. It was a wonderful choice. I was careful to not apologize for it, too!

I am happy to say my birthday was a success!! It was an awesome day with a good balance and flow. It was easily the best birthday I have had as a mom. Mostly because I was clearer ahead of time with others, and myself, about my priorities and expectations.

The other great thing about my birthday is where it lands on the calendar…because I have all this wisdom to apply again in just a few days for Mother’s Day. And you know, I think it will be the best one yet!