Pardon me, Madam, your neuroses are showing

Ah yes.  There's a title to pull 'em in.

This spring was a strange ol' season.  There was a fair bit of 'putting myself out there' - a big writing project for church, a reunion, a 10-week fiction workshop.  Some of these went a little more successfully than others: the church thing went well.  The reunion, super happy. The writing class, tragical crash n' burn.

What, you say?  You crashed and burned at writing??  Why yes, yes I did. Somehow I might have convinced all of you that the words come burbling from me like a mountain stream straight out of Heidi, and that I am, in general, a wildly confident person cruising around town in my Swagger Wagon.  If so, well, high fives.  I didn't mean to trick you.

Actually, there are a fair few games that my head plays with me.  And let me just say, my head does not play fair.  In fact using the word 'games' seems to give it a little frisson of fun, which is misleading because my head's not such a fun playmate these days.

There's the sneaky procrastination game, where my head convinces me that absolutely, tonight after the kids are in bed I mean early tomorrow morning okay so maybe during naptime if you can distract Lars with your iPhone things will get written/researched/dealt with.

Then my head starts up with the you can'ts and you'll nevers and the what is your frakking point??s.  Oh, and the constant sarcastic background noise of Awesome parenting, there, girlfriend. Keep it coming!

Add to this the standard (but usually quashed under layers of denial and willful ignorance) freakouts over  finances (oh, a stay at home mom?  hm.  yes, the finances are always a source of freakout), over What Will I BE When I Grow Up, over ack, you know.  Lots of things.  I'm kind of a professional freaker-outer.

In a totally polished and cheerful and zen sort of way, of course.

Why do I share this with you?  (See there? The what is your frakking point?? just popped up again.)

Well.  There is a lot out there on the interwebs about how we only present our very bestest most perfect selves on our blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter.  And this makes all the other people on the interwebs feel bad/anxious/depressed, imagining all of these perfect lives and being confronted with charming snapped-on-the-iPhone evidence of the perfection.  (I am guilty of the iPhone snapping. Sorry.)

But for all of that perceived perfection, I'd hazard a guess that most of us are just people trying to get by.  People doing the best they can, trying to ignore all the crazy in their head, one day at a time.

Maybe, just maybe, the sharing of small moments of joy has much less to do with lording my "perfect life" over yours, and more to do with trying to find whatever magic there is in my day.  Maybe it is a reminder to myself that amidst the yelling and the eye rolling and the peanut butter sandwiches there are tiny little shards of brilliance:  shards that, combined, make a gem of a life.

I'm thinking there must be those shards for all of us to gather.