The Bright Whites

Today I stumbled across an instagram account.  You know the kind.  One where all the pictures are clean and white and perfect.  The thought I've had a million times crossed my mind, "How do so many people have such identical bright white lives?!"  Then out of nowhere one post on this account said, "click the link in my profile to read my step-by-step process to clean white photo editing."  

This pretty immediately confirmed two things: 

1. It's all edited

2. I'm about to join the club of bright whites! 

So I read her post.  I downloaded two apps (yay for finally realizing what #vsco stands for...) 

And I started editing.  My goodness it was tedious.  I tweaked, and I zoomed, and I cropped... I have minimal artistic prowess, scant amounts of patience for the process and the results left a bit to be desired.  

It was just plain too much work.  Bright White can't be worth all this. 

But it is, my head keeps telling me.  You might get hundreds of followers that want to join the bright white club too!  Your life will look so mysteriously simple.  So clean and neat.  So unique yet so consistently predictable. 

But. The work. The time.  The tedious brush strokes!!!  Maybe their lives are just clean and bright and white and I'm just decorating my house wrong and dressing my kid in too many colors.  (She did say she edited though.)

The wise words of my mother echoed in my head, "Suzanne, you can't expect great results if you aren't willing to fuss with it a little."  Granted, we were talking about my hair. How I wanted curls but refused to spend the time with a curling iron.  How I wanted volume but didn't want to use combs and hairspray or any kind of product. How 2 minutes of pulling it into a semi-neat pony tail was too long already. 

So I sacrificed.  Sacrificed ideally awesome hair for an easy morning routine. 

And I'm seeing another sacrifice on the horizon.  I think I shall sacrifice a place in the Bright White club.  But I'm not sure what for. Laziness, at the very least.

 At most, it's because I don't want to get sucked into something that I'm sure will become a source of pride for me.  But that desire for pretty pictures and lots of white and superb lighting is really pulling at me.  Their bright white lives somehow look better than mine.  Their #realtalk somehow feels more fancy and less lame than my real talk because their pictures are perfect.  My pictures are blurry, shadowed, dark, with too many colors and edited right there on instagram *gasp*. 

And what had started out as innocent fun sharing of snippets of my life has turned into this mess of insecurity and confusion and bewilderment.  I wish I knew these moms better. The Bright Whites.  I wish I could see their houses with less touch up.  With the off white, the shadows, the conflicting colors, the messes quickly shoved out of the way in favor of a pristine photo shoot. That would be #realtalk to me.  It would make me feel less alone.  

But alas it won't end the Bright White epidemic (until the trendy tides shift).  So my next best option is to grow up, knock it off and be okay with my choice.  I'm not willing to fuss with my pictures.  I'm not artistic enough to pull it off anyway. So I'm gonna just document my life and my cute kid (who is bright white all on his own, thank you Germanic ancestry and Minnesota winters...).  I will enjoy my colors, shadows and messes. Admire their ability to be so darn consistent and artistic and patient. 

This isn't to say that anyone who chooses nicely framed pictures with lots of white and clean, crisp lighting and editing is bad or prideful.  I appreciate your ability to create such pieces of eye candy. But I have to bow out.  And keep telling myself it's okay.  Of all the problems facing all the moms, this surely can't be the worst.  

But it is indicative of a pretty common-to-mom thing...Insecurity.  And it shows up in different moms in different ways, am I right?  We are okay with our choices and life until it comes up next to someone elses that looks shinier than ours, in some way.  They've thought about things we didn't even know were things.  They've decided something is important to them and now we feel like we should take up the same causes.  We fret and worry and wonder and second guess. We miss out on the little joys of the choices we have made because of the ones we wonder if we should make.  

*sigh*  Definitely just preaching to myself at this point.  And hoping that there are other moms in this with me.  And I'm not just saying this so that we have something in common...but because I really do struggle.  Just as my poor husband.  He is so validating and works hard at keeping my mind on the right track.  But it comes down to believing the truth that I am a good mom, he is a good dad, we love our kid and we won't look the same as any other mom and dad in the whole wide world.  We bring a unique mix of our family histories, our personal preferences, our mutual goals, our fabulous personality flairs...and it is our story.  And for that I want to choose to be grateful.