Do you ever feel completely, insufferably boring?
After the high from my smashing new haircut wore off, I found myself wandering around the house aimlessly, feeling sort of dejected and down and bored. Seriously, like “let’s dig our own graves” kind of bored. Wallowing around on the couch feeling pitiful kind of bored.
Suddenly, it hit me. I wasn’t actually bored. I was just incredibly, exceptionally boring.
The family joke is that I cut off all my hair when I’m about to break up with someone. My hairdresser knew I was getting divorced before my first husband did (thought he’s Charlie Sheen crazy, so it probably would have taken him by surprise no matter what). I think my hair gets the whack when I want to change something in my life. I don’t actually want to break up with Officer Daddyman, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know, but the haircut is definitely related to my feeling of being boring. Deeply, broadly boring.
I realized that my hip, exciting, very-different-from-my-regular new haircut was the most interesting thing about me, at least from my perspective (I’m sure there’s a certain voyeuristic charm to watching my life from the outside, but y’all don’t have to live it).
Look at my day. My breakfast is almost always one of two things (oatmeal or yogurt), my lunch is variations on a theme (something on a salad), my dinner is something from my repertoire of about a dozen dishes. Coffee with breakfast, coffee again at 3. Homeschooling is challenging and even exciting in the big picture, but the day to day can get tedious, especially come this time of year. All day, every day, is filled with children and the million little things they require of me. Then it’s bedtime for the kids. Then I take a bath, have a glass of wine, and read a book. This could be any given day of the week. You can’t even tell if it’s a Monday or a Wednesday when you look at it. I love my family. I love my children. I love homeschooling and being a SAHM. I just feel like I, as an individual, am sort of boring myself to death with myself.
The sad thing is, it isn’t that the day is boring. It’s that I am boring. This is the routine that I have created. This is my handiwork, my boring, boring handiwork. Left to their own devices, my children would probably each come up with a completely different routine, all of which would likely conflict with each other, but which would at least be more colorful. Maybe those “let your kids do whatever they want” people have it right. Maybe I should give consensual living a chance simply because kids with fuzzy green teeth who stayed up until 4am might be different.
I worry that this comes across as a plea for validation. It isn’t. I get that I come across as at least minimally amusing on my blog. I’m a writer and if I cannot entertain you, then I obviously wasted my three years of graduate school (during which, I might add, I did not maintain a 4.0 GPA whilst pregnant and working like some other mom bloggers; I only managed a 3.8 while doing all those things) , since my blog is currently the only place I do any consistent writing (again, because I am boring, and cannot muster up enough creativity to really tackle my own creative projects). I’m not worried that I am perceived as boring; I’m worried that I am boring, in ways that y’all will never see, because I mask the truth of my boringness with my ability to tell a good story and poke fun at my own failings as a mother, homeschooler, and person.
Maybe it’s like body dysmorphia. Maybe I have a skewed perception of my personality, just like I’m sure I have a somewhat skewed perception of what my butt looks like. Maybe my really great and interesting personality and life are hiding underneath one of the cheeks of my ginormous backside. I guess I’m not the only one who feels this way. Do any of you sometimes feel hopelessly, helplessly boring, too? on’t try to validate me. You can commiserate with me, however, and let me know if I am like the cheese and stand alone (in my boring boringness) or if this is just part and parcel of being a homeschooler or a mom or just a person.
Are you boring, too?
