Pants-Free Parenting: 2014 in review

I opened up Facebook and saw, 'This was your year!” I clicked on the picture of me, one I had posted in April. It was a picture of me at 10, with my giant purple, plastic framed glasses, a sundress with a lace Peter Pan collar and a hat that I had decorated myself with rosettes made of purple tulle. I'm bony, my teeth stick out at so many varying angles it would make Euclid cry.

That awkward picture of me is the most honest picture of the group. The rest that Facebook used to curate my year, were all pictures of my children smiling or engaged in charming activities like dancing, sleeping or 'getting along.” The pictures of my husband and I show us smiling, no bags under our eyes. No exhausted elbow jabs. No you change the poopy diaper.

I appreciate Facebook's attempt at giving me nostalgia. But it's dishonest to call those pictures a summation of my year. In fact, I've scrolled through a lot of those year-in-review photo collections and they are all just a bunch of hogwash. They are just the sunny, perfect pictures we share to hide the grim realities of the rest of the year. And we all curate, we are all complicit in this game of showcasing who we want to be, rather than who we are. But I won't do it. I won't share those pictures. I won't pretend that my year was just happy, smiling faces on vacation. Because, while I do love remembering the good times, I have a problem with forgetting everything else.

In art, the balance of dark and light is called chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is used to give paintings a sense of volume and dimension. It's what makes faces in paintings glow, even hundreds of years later. It's what makes expressions come alive. Light and dark, together make a picture real. One without the other and what you get is something flat and abstract. So, with all due respect to the lighter pictures that are curated by social media, they are not an accurate reflection of anyone's year.

For every smiling picture, there are a dozen more darker moments, unshared and unremembered. For example, this year, I didn't get a good night's sleep until August. This year, I learned how to disarm a baby welding a knife and that children can ingest nicotine and be fine. I scrubbed my friend's refrigerator. I took hours cleaning the crumbs from the drawers, washing the shelves, sniffing pieces of cheese, listening to her sob in the other room - grieving the loss of her infant son. I stood for two hours in a church, feeling pain in my heart and in my knees, not knowing how I could possibly cry anymore and yet, still finding the tears. I've watched a dear friend leave a violent relationship. I've wallowed in abject failure at least a dozen times. My baby screamed at me and bit my leg. My daughter cried and called me stupid and said I hurt her feelings and she wasn't wrong. More than once, I said things to my husband that I wish I could take back. And I've had things said to me - passive aggressive remarks from disappointed family members and snide emails from people I've never met.

These, too, are not the totality of my year, but they are a part of it. And I want to remember them too. I want to remember them because they balance the more joyful moments. They remind me why joy is joy, that life is complicated and that we are so much more than a handful of smiling, edited photos. And in our remembrance of our past, we do a disservice to ourselves in not remembering those moments too. Because it's the dark that balances the light and dark is part of all of this too.

I hope you have a happy new year. But I also hope your year is wonderful and deep and complicated and above all, real.

' Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.