by Vickie Henderson, Miss November 2016
The death watch after my grandmother’s stroke ended on my birthday. Though I stayed for hours during those last nine days, she exhaled her last breath before I arrived at the hospital. My family stopped midway through the 100 mile trip for a quick birthday dinner. While the chef twirled knives over the hibachi I got the call. I plopped back into my seat to have a celebratory photo snapped with a grin cracked on my face to hide the crack in my heart. My hair was in place, my make-up looked fresh and I had on a cute shirt, but my sorrow was invisible.
My grandmother died on my birthday ten years ago, before my social media savviness days. Today, the birthday Polaroid oozing with life, would be posted to Facebook and Instagram. My followers would stop scrolling and hit the thumbs up button. I looked so dang happy. But I wasn’t.
Teddy was right,
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” (Theodore Roosevelt)
Next time you peek into the family life of your social media friends and wish your life was more like theirs, remember this:
A smiling picture only proves the muscles in the corners of your mouth work.
Would we envy someone’s family if we knew the whole story? If we could spread our two fingers to enlarge the photo and see inside the heart of the real struggles, we might feel immense gratitude for our own problems and family dysfunction. It’s easy to want what someone else has, until you realize what you have. So love your family, no matter what.
Your family is the best,
because they are yours.
“Leave it Beaver” went off the air in 1963. Now families are like patch-work; blended and grafted together. The ideal family of mom and dad and two and half kids is shattered by illness, death and divorce. Social media inundates us with happy family pictures and feeds the joy thief – comparison. A picture is worth a thousand words, but who knows if the audio matches the video?
I’ll be the first to admit, mine doesn’t. Though the hurt from the rift in our relationship was raw, we wound up in the same cool place together and on the other side of someone’s camera. Standing hip to hip, we plastered cheese over our lips and posted to Facebook. Comments blew up with, “Y’all look like you are having so much fun.” Yeah right. We were miserable, but no one knew. So quit comparing your family to another and love what you have instead of focusing on what you don’t have.
Your family is the best,
because they are yours.
“Be content with what you have” Hebrews 13:5 (ESV)