Perfect?

I don't know how to do this without sounding prideful.  It's not meant to be, so if you start getting ticked off at me, please don't.

I'm a military wife that homeschools her four fairly well-behaved kids.  I make as much food as I can from scratch, because I think it's the best for us.  I garden, because I think it's important that my kids not only know where their food comes from, but how to grow it should the need arise.  I can and freeze produce from my garden every summer.  I grind my own wheat and bake my own bread.  I type really fast (it was 72 wpm in high school), I talk really fast, and I learn really fast.  I'm really smart.  I can read a book in a day (and that's when I'm going slowly).  I can play piano and flute.  I teach Sunday School with my hubby, and we host home group.  I'm not afraid to speak in front of large groups.  I try to work out three times a week.  I've painted several rooms in the house (including the really tall walls in the living room).  I've made curtains for the kitchen and play room.  I move heavy furniture when I'm bored.  I make a heck of an apple pie.  I use coupons and sometimes I walk out of the grocery store with the store paying ME to take groceries.  And this isn't even everything I was doing in the last place we lived (where I helped run a women's Bible study group, was on staff at church, and counseled several women).

I don't try to do all this.  I really don't.  I just do it because it needs to be done and I'm right here to do it.  I'm a big proponent of "bloom where you're planted".  But the trouble with these wonderful talents that God has blessed me with is this - people think I'm perfect...and worse than that, I expect myself to be perfect.

I'm not.

What you don't see is what happens on the inside.  All this "talent" can make me feel like I'm "wasting" it by being a wife and stay-at-home mom.  I don't say "no" to a lot of things because, as a friend once said, I CAN do it and I love the challenge of getting it done.  You don't hear the mean things I say to myself because I've yet again said something stupid, or not done something perfectly.  There's a song by Francesca Battastelli with a line, "perfection is my enemy".  It is.  I can beat myself up incessantly over the tiniest little thing that no one else would ever notice. My brain never shuts off.

So when I hear someone (several people, actually) say, "when I look at you, I see the perfect wife, the perfect mom, the perfect 'whatever'", I just want to be sucked in by the ground, never to be seen again.  I don't want to be the person that people don't like because "she can do everything,  why would she need me?"

I am the way I am because God made me this way.  I guess He knew that I was going to be a lonely little girl that needed to be able to make friends easily.... a military wife with a hubby who's gone a bit.... a homeschooling mom to four kids... someone who needs to be able to get it all done....but it's not me.  It's God.

It's God, it's God, it's God.  He is the only reason I can do any of this.