Please Don't Accuse Me Of Being Amazing

I write a lot about surviving the challenges of daily life. Some days, my challenges may seem more difficult than the next person's, and other days I breeze through it all.

Very often, I will receive a message or see comments on a Facebook post that praise me as some kind of super parent. I know the whole "Cape in the Dryer" thing would lead you to believe that somewhere in my mind, I think I'm pretty super too. But that's the irony of the whole "In the Dryer" concept.

When the kids need me to do all things and be all things, and my mother calls and wants to know why I haven't called her, and the boss calls and says one of our ladies called in sick and I'll be two hands short, and the dog has diarrhea, and I found out when I stepped in it...on my way out the door when I was already running late for work...THAT'S when the universe seems to think I must have some super power. Some supernatural ability to manage all of it. There is always a possibility that I am having an "ON" day and I WILL get it all taken care of. But it's much more likely that I will fall short.

The actuality of my superpowers might look something like this:

After sleeping until the last possible minute, (because the boy only stopped jumping and singing Christmas songs around 4 AM), I might have missed the girl's bus but we have 15 minutes to get to school, and if there's no line at the drive thru, I can get her a bagel and that takes care of breakfast. Then I'll drop her and head back home to shower the boy and get him outside in time for his bus. I'll contemplate a shower for myself, and realize there is no way I can pull it off, so I'll put on the work clothes and extra deodorant, slip into my shoes and go back into the kitchen for my purse. When I step in the puddle of what leaked out of my dog, I will rinse my shoe with bleach in the sink, (as I THANK JESUS I was wearing my shoes!!!), and I'll leave for work without having a minute to clean up puppy's puddle. I will then come home from work and have to chisel dried on dog shit off the floor and disinfect the whole damned kitchen. I'll be so damned disgusted by the time it's cleaned, I'm not about to start cooking, so I'll run to the store for two $4.99 rotisserie chickens and pray I have paper plates. The only thing super about the whole day is that I survived it.

By example of the above scenario, not only would it be more likely my cape is in the dryer, but there is a good chance it is a wrinkled mess, lying at the bottom of Mount Laundrasuvius on the dining room table.

There may have been a time in my life when I allowed myself to feel stressed over trying to accomplish everything that was dropped in front of me. That time is a distant memory. Being married to an anal retentive control freak (who grew up in a house where you couldn't walk on the vacuum lines in the carpet) was always a factor in the stress. Having kids, and throwing autism into the mix made me see the most important priorities more clearly. The hubby had no such epiphany, and the differences in what we could personally tolerate were certainly a driving force in the inevitable split. But now that he's gone, I can comfortably wear my cape, or I can curse a lot because the boy wanted to hold the cape and he fell asleep and peed on it. Either way, no stress.

The only difference between me and the parent who is pulling out hair by the fistful on the way to the psychiatrist to refill the Xanax prescription is my CHOICE to be satisfied with whatever I accomplished today. I have no preset vision of what I'm SUPPOSED TO get done in the course of a day. I have no unrealistic expectations of what has to be finished before I finally pass out from the sheer exhaustion of the daily grind. So the fact that I am dancing at the end of a particularly harrowing afternoon is thanks to my choice to set the bar a little lower. I might start out a day having full confidence I can complete every task on a long and tedious to-do list, but I no longer beat myself up for leaving half the list undone. The dirt, the dishes and Laundry Mountain will be there tomorrow.

If you ever read about all the craziness that rolled through my day, and wondered how I could possibly get it all done and still have the time and energy for dancing, the answer is, I didn't. I didn't get it all done. I got the most IMPORTANT things done. I fed the kids. I got them to school. I got to work. I took care of the dog. I made sure the house was inhabitable. I made sure we were safe. Anything over and above that list is gravy. I'm NOT amazing. I'm NOT a supermom. I've just learned to forgive myself for NOT being an amazing supermom. And I've learned to dance about it.

There is no superpower.

There is no magic.

There is no cape.

Well, there IS a cape. There really is. But it's in the dryer.