Sometimes as a stay-at-home-mom you get a bug in your butt to go above and beyond the call of duty (probably not a plague solely inflicting stay-at-home-moms but that's beside the point). It usually strikes me during two very different times. 1. When I am having a really crappy day and everything is a cluster and I think creating something will make me feel better and somehow cause the universe to right itself again. 2. When I am having a particularly GOOD day and the house is clean and dinner is in the crock pot and the kids have been at my parent's house for the better part of the afternoon and I feel a calmness in my soul that only comes when I haven't had to answer any questions or sing any songs that involve arm movements for a few hours. Today was one of the latter. The boys and I came home from my parent's and I put Graham down and thought, "yes, Everett and I will bake cupcakes for community group and I will make them kind of fancy and Cory will come home to a happy, smiling wife who is aglow from the glorious combination of a sense of accomplishment and extreme amounts of sugar.
So as we set to work making said cupcakes everything was going so smoothly and a part of me, just a small little voice, was thinking how awesome of a baker I was and how impressed I was with myself and if my inner voice used the term "you go girl," then maybe you get the picture. And just as I was finishing the final step (red velvet cupcakes with homemade chocolate whipped cream filling and mascarpone butter cream frosting by the way, what am I freaking nuts??) I realized that my stupid frosting was too runny and I was out of powdered sugar. This is that moment that everyone knows where your romantic afternoon baking adventure turns into frantic attempts at correction and intense irrational anger and let's just say my inner voice had changed it's tune quite a bit in a matter of seconds.
Now, a rational person would simply cover the frosting and throw it in the fridge and run out for some powdered sugar when her child woke up. But I am not a rational person. So instead I tried adding a little more cheese and the dregs of powdered sugar I could brush off the counter and out of the empty container and said a little prayer over my Kitchen Aid. What resulted from this was an ever so slightly thicker frosting that I went ahead and frosted my cupcakes with. Now, as I type this , the cupcakes are sitting in the fridge as the frosting sslllloooowwlly slides of each beautiful red velvet cupcake and onto the bottom of the container which will result in some kind of lake of frosting in a matter of hours.
My first thought after I realized that they weren't going to turn out beautiful and perfect was "well, I'm definitely not serving these to anyone," because who wants to expose a SINGLE FLAW and own up to the fact that you aren't the world's best baker? Certainly not me. And as that thought crossed my mind I was immediately slapped in the face with how dumb it was. Newsflash: no one thinks I'm perfect. The only one who expects my perfection is me, which is even crazier because who more than myself is daily faced with my imperfections, mistakes, and shortfalls. I've realized lately, and this situation being just one of many moments that have helped me solidify this realization, is that I am WAY too hard on myself. That so much of my life is spent not doing the things that bring me joy because they feel hard or I might fail or worst of all, people will this less of me. I start writing a blog post, read it back to myself and think of how much better it could be and then delete it. I think about making a craft or start making a craft and then get frustrated when it's not perfect and give up, or never start in the first place. I have always known that I pay way too much regard to what other people think of me, but I never realized how much I was letting my own self-judgement get in the way, and how many GOOD things were so often spoiled by my fear of failure.
So tomorrow, I'm going to slap those weird looking but probably delicious cupcakes on a cute pie plate and I'm going to serve them with joy in my heart because making something weird looking is better that not making something because you are afraid it's going to be weird looking. I think that will be my new life mantra, can someone please whip up some kind of cute craft with that quote in gold glitter please?
