What Are Your Internal Expectations?
We love to control and shape and orchestrate everything until a "moment" has become a manipulation. We love to blame Pinterest and Instagram for this pressure. I don't buy it. I mean, I'm as guilty as the next person who labors too long over the perfect filter to make my risotto look creamier, my Christmas tree more sparkly, and my crow's-feet awash in a beautiful blur. But come on. The reign of social media did not create this pressure in our lives. It only threw gasoline on it. Those of us who have obsessed over the pages of magazines (remember those?) and idolized our favorite TV celebrity moms (remember them?) can reluctantly admit that at the heart of the mommy-comparison game is our own inadequacy. Ask your mother or your grandmother if Instagram is to blame for this phenomenon. Watch her throw back her beautiful head of gray hair and laugh. The struggle is not new.
I'm realizing how many moments of real life I have sacrificed on the altar of perfection. Even a simple and sweet commitment to a family tradition has left me susceptible to this pressure. For years we visited the same Santa at the mall. He is kind of legendary. His day job is as a philosophy professor at a prestigious university, but one day someone keenly pointed out his remarkable resemblance to Saint Nick, and now every December he leaves his job on a college campus to let our precious babies sit on his red-velvet lap and whisper their wishes. The beard is real. The dainty glasses, the belly, the chuckle—all real. The dreadful line around the mall to see him was really real. The first time my friend Shannon and I waited in line for multiple hours and I finally got up close and placed my baby in his arms, I actually started crying. I believed in Santa again for one beautiful, magical second. All our Santa pictures, every Christmas, were with this Santa. But as his popularity grew, so did the unfathomably long lines to see him. Shannon and I suffered through. We stood and paced and jostled each other's babies and chased around our exhausted toddlers, stuffed in their cardigans and taffeta, melting down as multiple naptimes came and went.
This is our Santa! We are waiting in this line!
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We ran out of snacks. We ran out of clever games to keep the kids occupied. We ran out of compassion for other mothers and their terrible, awful children who did not deserve presents. We ran out of the capacity to make rational decisions. We took Santa's name in vain under our breath. We wondered aloud if reindeer meat tasted like chicken.
But this is our Santa! All the Santa pictures have to match the other Santa pictures from year to year! It's worth it. It's worth it!
One year Shannon looked at me with fresh snot and Cheetos stains on her shirt and drew a line in the snow. "Never again. I'm never standing in this line again. There are other Santas."
And with that, we were finished with the only actual Christmas tradition I'd ever committed to keeping with my kids—until years later when I was held hostage by the daily shame that is the Elf on the Shelf.
We cheated on Santa. We saw other Santas. The pictures don't match (I'm not even sure where the pictures are now), but my kids never noticed the difference. In fact, most of the things we become hyper-obsessed about don't even register with our children as significant.
One year, for Charlie's 10th birthday, I made a campground in our living room. I went to Home Depot and purchased actual pieces of lumber and drill bits called dowels or something, and made seven different little makeshift tents, a pretend fire in the middle with orange and yellow tissue paper flames, and a Mason jar lantern for each tent with its own battery-operated votive candle.
I don't think you understand. I can barely hang a picture on the wall. But five hours of YouTube later, I was building tents with power tools. It was beyond fun, to be honest. Really, it was. It nearly killed me, but I had such a blast with the whole thing.
What does Charlie remember about my Herculean efforts to create the perfect indoor Campapalooza? His friend Logan farting in everyone's tent until they all almost lost consciousness from laughing. Great. Oh, and the pizza, which was delivery, and the only thing under my roof that wasn't homemade.
Was I ridiculous to go through all the effort? No. It was how I loved him well on his birthday. But was all that effort what made the memories so happy? Nope. Would I do it again?
Probably.
It's easy for me to look back at this and gently pat my former mommy self on the head. It's so different now. It's not that I don't care about "the moment" as much. It's just that I don't need to be the curator and hostess of my life. I'm not a museum guide . . . If you'll look over here to the left, you'll notice all the Santa photographs that match and the adorable birthday tents.
My friend Shauna Niequist says it beautifully in her brilliant book Present Over Perfect: "Sink deeply into the world as it stands . . . This is where life is,not in some imaginary, photo-shoppeddreamland. Here. Now. You, just as you are. Me, just as I am . . . Perfect has nothing on truly, completely, wide-eyed, open-souled present."
Slowing down doesn't always mean addressing external pressures or schedules or situations. Oftentimes it involves taking a look at internal expectations. Slowing down our own selves long enough to notice that the guy who works at Jiffy Lube is a pretty decent Santa and Pizza Hut still has the best crust. Open-souled present. It means recognizing that the big, toothy smile on your child's face is never proportionate to the effort you exerted or your own ludicrous, self-imposed standards.
Excerpted from Nichole Nordeman 's book Slow Down (Thomas Nelson, 2017).
