Lately I don’t feel like writing about Lebanon. I don’t even
want to remember that I’m here. But I like writing and don’t want to see this
blog crust over completely from disuse. Too bad I can’t find joy in baking
cupcakes and taking photos of them and then posting all about it on a blog
called “Happy, Perfect Mommy’s Happy, Perfect Life”.
Ah, yes, I can see it. The homepage of this blog would show my husband (who
would be called Matt, or maybe Peter), our two apple-cheeked toddlers and
myself all hugging each other on a green lawn in front of our home with Errol,
our yellow Labrador, grinning at our feet.
I wouldn’t overlook the little introductory blurb beside the ecstatically happy
family photo. It would say: My name is Jessica and I am a Christian and a
mother to two beautiful boys. My husband Matt (or Peter) is almost as perfect
as I am. He teaches grade five at our local school and still has all his hair.
We live in a town that isn’t too big or too small and where neighbours still
look out for each other (we even have a white picket fence around our back
yard! lol). My greatest pride in life is being the best mommy I can be to our
boys and recording every precious moment of their childhood in my scrapbooks.
In this blog you will find thousands and thousands of photos of my scrapbooks
and of delicious, nutritious meals I’ve prepared and funny stories about our
little family (my favourite is one in which Matt gets a flat tire on the way to
bible study and in changing the tire gets some grease on his shirt and then
later at bible study everyone chides him for showing up in dirty clothes ha ha
ha oh, you had to have been there, it was so funny!)
In one photo you would see me standing in a bikini two weeks after delivering
my second son and with the aid of a magnifying glass detect a tiny bulge just
above my bikini bottoms. Here I would have the caption: OMG! I would never
have posted this if I’d noticed that huge roll of blubber around my middle!
Well, thanks to boot camp I was able to shed all my “baby weight” two days
after this photo was taken and get right back to running sixteen miles a day
(BTW I’ve already got Jayden up to two miles a day and have promised Dylan that
he can start coming out with us on his second birthday).
I would fill pages with
photos of my knitting projects, and there would be dozens of comments from
dedicated readers of my blog (many of them perfect strangers!) who would say
kind things or ask me for patterns. Many more pages would show our family
sitting around the supper table, or blowing out birthday candles while a
roomful of friends and relatives cheered and didn’t look at their watches.
There would be a shot (possibly my favourite) of Matt wearing a green
fisherman’s sweater I had knitted – one of my earliest successes. He would be
chopping wood behind the house on a crisp October day, pausing just long enough
to look over his shoulder and smile tenderly at me while I snapped the photo.
My blog would have a huge following. Not a single male would feature amongst my
followers but with women it would be a hit. Entering my blog site would be, for
them, like stepping into the set of a Hollywood sit-com, where the world is a
cosy living room and things always end well. They would never have to know
about Matt’s affair with the school janitor or Errol’s habit of biting my
mother-in-law. I would die before letting them guess at the pure evil
that was my older son or find out that we’d never been able to get another
babysitter after he teased the last one by dashing out into the street into
oncoming traffic (the tractor-trailer passed right over top of him, not harming
a hair on his head. GOD WILL PROTECT US). I would see that it never got out
that I hate cats and turn the hose on any I find taking dumps in my flowerbed.
I could manage to keep anyone from finding out our true identity by dropping
misleading hints about which province we lived in and lying about our names
(which would actually be Tammy and Raul). My followers would never know that
Matt (Raul) hated my cooking and would wait until after I went to bed to get
out the Doritos and Captain Morgan.
You know, I find myself suddenly warming to Jessica, now that I know she’s
actually Tammy (who, by the way, suffers from bulimia and has never run farther
than from her car to the door of a Dunkin’ Donuts in her life). Raul sounds
more interesting too, what with the Doritos and extramarital affairs, and as
for the kids, well, I could learn to respect a kid with Jayden’s
resourcefulness. Maybe I should make a blog about this family. They’re
really starting to intrigue me.