OK, so it’s hard not to feel a little envious of Blake Lively and her perfect husband, hair and the fact that she can lay her hands on as much Chanel merchandise as she wants to.
But get this, the beautiful Blake, who is mum to one-year-old James (a girl, by the way, in case the name confused you) and currently pregnant with baby #2, is in no way immune to the mayhem and shit show that is parenting a small child.
In a recent appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, the actress opened up about what it is like to be a mum to a one-year-old, while also taking a minute to call out all those perfect social media parents who make it look way too easy. In fact, before becoming a mother herself, Blake confessed she kind of thought parenting would look a lot more like the beautifully curated photos she keeps seeing on Instagram. (Don’t worry, Blake, we all did!)
“There’s a lady on Instagram who I used to love to watch,” she explained to Meyers. “Her name was Old Joy, and she just made having a baby look lovely. Everything is white, and she always has a fresh blueberry pie that’s steaming, and scones and clotted cream, and she’s reading Old Man And The Sea. Her little baby… is just, like, sleeping while knitting… and her toddler is like giving her a reflexology massage. [I’m thinking], What?!”
In fairness, if anyone could easily afford to re-create this kind of beautifully staged family life, it would he Blake and her equally genetically blessed husband, but luckily she admits that her own home life looks nothing like that.
“My kid is, like, playing with explosive devices,” she joked. “[She’s] sticking things in our dog’s ear. She already knows how to drywall because she puts holes in the wall… I went from loving Old Joy to wanting to kidnap her so that she won’t post any more torture for me.”
Meyers, who himself has got a three-month-old at home, chimed in and said he knows exactly what Lively is talking about. “My wife looks at a lot of Instagram accounts that are that perfect new mother world,” he revealed. “And it’s cruel. It’s cruel and unusual for people… it’s not real.”
That’s the thing, though, about social media. It has given us the ability to snoop into each other’s lives and behind each other’s doors, and then we start to compare what we see with how our own lives are looking, and often, we feel like we come up short.
In reality, what we are seeing is the highlights, the filtered snaps taken at an angle so that all the mess from actually baking that blueberry pie is left out of the shot. And toddlers in the bath together looks terribly cute, but nobody shares what the bathroom looks like after, with the soggy towels on the floor and kids howling because bath-time is over.
Remember this, mamas, just like Blake said it; we are all in the trenches together. Some of us are just really good at making those trenches look really chic in photographs!
Have YOU ever looked at photos of other people’s homes and family life on social media and felt like you didn’t measure up? Have social media made us feel worse about ourselves as parents? Let us know your thoughts in the comments or tweet us at @Herfamilydotie
