Vol 7: The Real Life of a Momprenuer: Real Life is Not Full of White Backgrounds

I follow some other fellow moms and a general mom lifestyle account on Instagram and these past few weeks I can’t help but get frustrated at the images they post. Staged, polished, perfected, and (my biggest grudge) full of eternal white backgrounds.

White walls, white bed sheets, white onesies, white everything.

Why does this irritate me so, you might ask? Because anyone with a kid (or let’s be honest here, anyone that has ever even just met a kid), knows that kids are insanely messy. Putting Evie on a white comforter would give me heartburn as I know it would be only a matter of seconds until she did something to stain it.

But I am going to take this one step further and say that to me, these endless white backgrounds and staged photos give the impression that these women’s lives are pristine, clean, and perfect. But that is not real life. Real life is messy. Real life is dirty. And real life is unpredictable. And having a kid only augments those things. I see these pictures and I get funny images of the reality behind it … “no wait, we can’t take a picture until we find a white wall!”.

And seeing endless images of perfectly clean and staged images of kids is not inspiring to me, it’s exhausting. Because my life most certainly does not look like that (it looks much more like the image above – messy hair on my head, attempting to keep Evie from my laptop, and no white backgrounds in sight), and I can’t imagine that in reality, anyone else’s life is really like that either.

So why do we put these images on social media? If this isn’t reality, then what’s their point? I really don’t know. But I can guarantee you that you probably won’t ever see pictures like this on my social accounts, because in all honesty, as a mompreneur, I don’t have the time to stage my images, or spend extra time searching for that perfect white background. I am much too preoccupied with my perfectly messy, dirty, & unstaged life.