Learning About the Perfection Infection

A few weeks ago I checked out a book from our library titled "No More Perfect Moms" by Jill Savage. A few months prior I had seen the book on an email listing that I subscribe to that lets you know about good deals on Christian books for Kindle readers. It was on there and looked interesting, instead of buying it I decided to wait until it was available at our library.

I rarely pick up a book that causes me to grab a pen and paper and start taking notes on it but this one did it to me (I can only think of one other one right now that wasn't part of a Bible study that I was doing). After reading the first chapter I knew that there was a lot in this book for me to learn and had it been my own I would have started underlining and making notes in the column. After I satisfied the urge to make notes I got the urge to share my findings with others. 

The book covers eight different areas of a mom's life that area affected by what she calls the "Perfection Infection" that has taken over our world. As I read through the book I plan to share what she has to say and how each of these areas affect my life.

The Basics: The Perfection Infection

How many times in a week or even day do you find yourself looking at pictures your friends have posted either to Facebook or their blog and say to yourself, "only if..." That is the first step to the Perfection Infection that Jill Savage writes about. 

When we do this we are "comparing insides and outsides". We look at these pictures and all we see are things that we wish we had or that our marriage would be that happy or that our kid would be like that. Jill writes that we are "comparing our messy insides - our struggles, our failures, our less-than-perfect lives - to other women's carefully cleaned-up, perfect looking outsides" (pg 15).

What we fail to remember is to consider how often do we post things that are hard and terrible in our lives out there for the general public to see; don't you think this is true for your friends as well? We all hide our true selves and in turn we are hindering the friendships that we could be making. 

With these basics in place, Jill Savage goes into more details on how trying to be perfect breaks into different areas of our lives and I can't wait to dig deeper into these areas.