Be a good mom... you've got to try a little harder.

I've always felt an enormous amount of pressure to be as good as everyone else. And in my mind, everyone else has always been ahead of me in everything. Somewhere around my sophomore year, I decided that I had basically failed at being popular or worthwhile during school, and if I wanted to be happy, I had better start learning what I needed to know to be a good wife and mother some day. I bought yeast and learned to make bread. I scoured tips from the Queen of Clean and cleaned my entire kitchen with Borax. I learned to sew buttons and do a simple ladder stitch. I made lemonade from fresh lemons and practiced piping frosting with the cute little tips. I studied a website on french braiding hair, because I figured that was important too. I remember someone showing this link to me, incredulously, and I thought it was perfect: http://www.j-walk.com/other/goodwife/index.htm.
Even with all of my dedication to preparing and planning and practicing, I've considered most of my performance to be sub par. I've never quite achieved the "put together" standard I've been striving for. I don't even have a cookie jar, let alone one that is always stocked. I have a hard time remembering to even refill our Brita pitcher, so having fresh slices of lemon and lime for it is out of the question. Dinner sneaks up on me 6 nights out of 7, and I consider laundry to be in a good place if my clean pile is bigger than my dirty pile.
The longer I live, the more I realize that my life is more ordinary than I give myself credit for. Expanding my social network, and watching a little TV, I've come to see that I'm not the only one who scrambles to throw clutter into laundry baskets and hide them before company comes over. I'm not the only one who uses breakfast food for lunch or puts the children to bed in mismatched pajamas. I'm not even the only one to send them out in public with mismatched socks. At first, I wasn't sure if this was more a relief ("at least I'm not so far behind") or more of a devastation ("I'll NEVER be a completely put together person, jut like everyone else isn't either"). But don't worry about me, I haven't given up. I still have every intention of buying a cookie jar.