Social Reality vs. Perception and Being Real

I did something this morning that I never do...I posted a family photo and then deleted it a few minutes later. I had taken time last night to crop it and capture the smiles and logged in this morning and loaded it to Instagram/FB and then started to think about it and decided it needed to come down.

Why?

It was fake. It showed the four of us smiling and giving the impression that we were having an amazing time at an event. We weren't. The event was great but the Altman family was not at our best.




It didn't show that we had to fight the children to get one shot of everyone smiling. It didn't show the 8 photos before where the kids were completely uncooperative. It doesn't show Karson crying because he hit his head climbing in places he shouldn't have been climbing.

It didn't show that 15 minutes before this photo, I was whispering (maybe almost growling) to Karson to sit still, stop talking, and be respectful while he wiggled in my lap and flailed around.

It also didn't show that Karson walked across the front of the room in front of the speaker (and hundreds of people) instead of going outside and around like his father asked him to do.

It doesn't show that Jackson had his head on the table for part of the speeches and the rest of the time he had misery face like we had chained him to the chair.

Funny thing is, we didn't even ask for the photo. A sweet lady asked us if we wanted to "trade" photography and she'd take a pic of us and we could take a photo of her and her husband. We said yes because it's the right thing to do. You want to commemorate fun experiences and this one should have been fun.

It's a cute picture. It'll go in to the Dropbox file with all the others and I'll look back in a year or five and say how cute the boys were and probably forget that we left early because they were done (Karson literally asked to go home about 25 times) and my tolerance for their attitudes had run thin.

For today, I will not present our family as one who is always happy and smiling when the reality is that we had a bad night. It was a bad on top of a rough weekend, a rough Monday, and all the things that go along with getting back in to a school routine.

These things happen. It's the reality of having children. This isn't the first time we had a bad night and it certainly won't be the last. We'll be sure to pay attention to their demeanor from now on before we push ahead with plans so that we aren't asking them to do more than they are capable of doing at that time and honestly to preserve our own sanity. 😏

See you on the roads!