Skip to main content

Season's Greetings?

Sometimes I write things that do not make sense. I usually do not share this stuff. Unfortunately for you, that is not the case today.

Life feels very busy right now. Busy isn’t always bad. But this feels like the noisy, transactional kind of busy that leaves you tired and unsatisfied with life. It isn’t the good, productive, and fulfilling kind of busy that shouldn’t be discounted as an equally valuable undercurrent in our lives.
It’s the bad kind of busy.

Right now I’ve got 5,062 unread emails. Now in fairness, I’m bad at staying on top of this stuff but that truly seems like a lot. This holiday season it just feels like more than ever before all we are giving each other is the gift of email, of this non-stop banter and back and forth. A perpetual volleying of words and tasks that literally never ends. Have any of your emails ever actually ended? Like with a, okay, thanks, this is done now, goodbye? No! They never end. They just live on and morph into new mindless tasks that actually have no real importance four days or even four minutes after they are sent. And yet it is 11:45 and I’m literally bleeding from my corneas trying to get through them knowing full well how exhausted I’ll be the next day, how I’ll take that exhaustion out on my family.
And for what?

More than ever, this holiday season I have to be okay with letting stuff drop. This is something I have always been terrible at. I am a rule follower. I am the kid who always had her homework done on time, who always followed up, who always showed up, who always outwardly did the right thing. But things are just so noisy and transactional right now that my body is literally screaming DO NOT SHOW UP. BE LATE. DO NOT RESPOND.
You know, I was listening to the radio the other night and a woman called in and they asked her what she wanted most this year for Christmas and you know what she said? A new iPad cover. And for some reason I just can’t stop thinking about this. More than anything, she wants a new piece of plastic or whatever to protect her iPad. Like, she already spent money on one. And it got some much use that she needs a new one. And this is what’s most important to her. And I just thought to myself, well that’s just it.

We’ve all lost our minds.
This year, we need to open ourselves and apparently our iPads up to vulnerability. Let yourself be bad or late at something, forgive yourself for that. Turn in and don’t be afraid of what you might find. As for me? I promise to give you the gift of less. I pledge to let my inbox keep growing and responding to almost nothing. I promise to send you almost no emails (I may have one or two more up my sleeve but otherwise I’m completely out of Internet gas). I pledge to share with you no social media snark. Because I am exhausted of a world seemingly comprised of camps of people who think in ways that never intersect on anything and who are all also entirely right about everything all of the time. For this makes no sense.

Instead, I am going to fill up on my family, gratitude, and good things. I am going to do less transactional stuff in the short term because it is making me exhausted. I am going to seek out more of the real kind of busy-ness, the good kind, that fills me up in a happy way, and that leaves me falling on my pillow with a smile on my face and a full heart knowing that it was all worth it today.
Does any of this make any sense? Probably not. Instead, I leave you with a bunch of happy random stuff. I call them links of awesomeness. Love on. Put more in to you and those you love. Do less. Please forget all the rest of it. Because that’s what matters this holiday season and actually that’s really all that ever matters.

Love,

Jenn
 

Comments

  1. LOL: "This year, we need to open ourselves and apparently our iPads up to vulnerability." But true! This was another great post. I look forward to all of them, Jenn.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rachel Hollis' Instagram is The Bad Place

  Women, mothers, pull up a chair.  I wish to have a word with you about Rachel Hollis, toxic positivity, and women as a commodity.  Do you know Rachel Hollis? She is a self proclaimed motivational speaker and life coach. She has nearly 2 million followers on Instagram, has published multiple NY Times bestsellers, and runs her own business, has a product line in Target, a clothing line on QVC, her own fitness app, and sells out large convention size stadiums where people pay $40 for a general ticket or up to $200 per person for a VIP pass that will give them things like “digital swag” (those two words together form a new one that has an unclear meaning to me), and video playback on all speakers. Rachel Hollis is a business and the thing that she is selling? Why that’s you. It wasn’t always this way. As one of the few bloggers still kicking around that started out nearly nine years ago, many of us old folks can tell you how quickly the landscape of personal essays and blogging changed.

Distracted Living

Last week, I almost killed my daughter. It started off as really any other week ever does. My husband had been travelling pretty much non-stop for nearly the entire month. Whether we wanted to or not, we were all falling into a fairly regular rhythm without him, at least Monday-Friday. With school and activities and for better or worse, the days seemed to move rather quickly but by evening all three of us were stretched thin. Collectively, we all seemed to peek at maximum crabbiness somewhere around 6pm. It was shortly after this time last Wednesday night that I brought the kids upstairs to help them get washed up for bed. My daughter had an upset stomach for most of the day but I hadn’t thought much of it. She was otherwise happy and playing and generally herself. I did know that she was very tired. Still, we were a good hour and a half from her usual bedtime of around 8pm. I put her in the bath and let it start to fill and left the room to go start the shower for my son. This is

Keeping it Real

I received an email tonight from a fellow mom. Really, it was more of a detailed confession of all of the things she’d done wrong today as a mother. It ended with two simple words: “Parent fail.” Her email both broke my heart and made me super angry because you see, she’s really a terrific mom. But today, she must have used someone else’s measuring stick to make that call. It troubled me in particular because motherhood and parenthood for that matter, is definitely not measured or won or lost on a battle by battle or day to day basis. We’re in this for the long haul people. Did your child watch six hours of TV today or eat pizza for dinner every night this week? What really matters at the end of the day? Let’s just admit my own bias here. If we are measuring this stuff on a day to day basis, I’m assuming I would have done a pretty sub-par job by most people’s standards. I brought my son to the grocery store in a rainbow colored clown wig and pajamas because it was the only way I co