A picture perfect life. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

On Christmas Eve, I received a Facebook message from someone I worked with for a few months about 5 years ago. It really caught me off guard, she wrote “Not everyone has a picture perfect life or wants to see yours” Just for the record, no one has a perfect life. No one. Not even me.

No one has a perfect life, perfect marriage, perfect kids, perfect parents, a perfect job, a perfect home, no one. I’m going to let y’all in on a little secret. All those pictures I post on Facebook and Instagram…those pictures that are making my family look so perfect. You are never going to believe this but those pictures are not real life. There is probably some kind of filter applied to it, it was most likely retaken at least 25 times while my husband and I were arguing about how many more times we needed to take it, and it was probably totally staged. You don’t see what happened moments before the picture was taken and you also don’t see what happened after.

I don’t always make pretty meals and desserts like what you see on my Instagram, heck some nights it’s pizza or McDonald’s for dinner, and I definitely don’t always have a clean home. I am a busy mom who works full-time, and my husband works even harder. My day starts at 5am when my alarm goes off, I have to be out the door by 5:45am. My husband leaves even earlier than I do, most mornings we don’t even see our kids before we leave for work. My grandmother comes to the rescue to get them up, presentable and to the bus stop by 6:40am. I drive a school bus full-time, that in itself isn’t what one would consider a glamorous job, especially with our new uniforms we have to wear. My work day ends around 5pm and I don’t get home until 5:30pm where the routine consists of homework, dinner, baths, and bedtime. I barely get to see my girls during the week because we are so busy. Bedtime is around 8:00pm and my eight year old still sleeps in bed with my husband and I most nights, that’s a battle I just don’t have the energy to fight and it’s easier to just let her fall asleep with me because that 5am alarm comes very early. I figure sooner or later she will want to sleep in her own bed.

Let’s be real, no one is posting pictures of the bad, ugly parts of their days.
The pictures that get shared on social media are the result of chaos, we got ONE good picture, in the midst of our otherwise chaotic life.

I’m not perfect, nor will I ever be perfect.

So welcome to my not so picture perfect life, filled with filters, tween girls arguing behind every picture, a beagle who never stops barking, a husband who rolls his eyes every time the camera comes out, and a mom that’s drinks a lot of wine to survive.

This is me, this is us.

The not so picture perfect mom, with the not so picture perfect life.

We’re not perfect. And that’s okay.

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