The Post in which I Apologize for Hiding my Firstborn’s Tendency Toward Tempermental Outbursts

Today I mentioned that I should blog about something that happened in our family.

YaYa rolled her eyes and looked at me across the supper table and said, “You know, your blog isn’t always the whole truth.  It’s not the whole story.  For example, you always write and make me look like some kind of angel, and that just kind of weirds me out, Mom.”

Her statement made me nearly spit out my pasta.

It’s tricky, this business of documenting my life, but not wanting to expose everyone’s bad deeds in the process.  It’s tricky to be transparent but not reveal aspects of our family that incriminate people, or will make them upset in the future when they read through the events of their childhood.  I probably do err in on the side of recording things a bit more positive light than they actually happen, and of course, all stories on my blog are told from my perspective.  I take for granted that readers realize that the characters in the story may have a different view of circumstances that I write about.

That said, however, I was definitely surprised my children called me out for making them look better than they actually behave.  It was kind of amusing to me.

In some ways, I suppose it’s like my phone voice.  If you call me up, I will answer the phone in a cheery upbeat voice.  I do this automatically, no  matter what horrendous thing is happening around me when the phone rings, and despite the fact that I really hate, despise actually, talking on the phone.  My family is always giving me grief about my phone voice.  My mother has a phone voice.  When I lived at home I could never believe her cheerfulness on the phone, especially with people she didn’t know really well.  My grandmother had a phone voice too.  What can I say?  I learned from the best.

I think there is a natural tendency to want to make things look good for others.  Part of it is based on the hope that things will go more smoothly some day.  Part of this is based in insecurities and fear about what people might think if they realize how crazy and nonpleasant things can sometimes be.  I think everyone does this to some extent, and that it probably isn’t ALL bad, but being vulnerable and transparent can be incredibly valuable as well.  I’m working on that in lots of aspects of my life.

Hopefully you don’t visit this space on the internet thinking that we are a goody two shoes family.  Trust me.  We’re not.  Not at all.

I guess the moral is:  take everything on this blog with a grain of salt?  According to my firstborn, everything is worse than I make it sound!