Happily Ever After

Three years ago last week, we moved into our new-to-us home. It's not large or fancy, just a simple brick rancher built in the 50s, but it's perfect for us. The moment we walked in the front door, we knew it was our home. 

The house sits on a hill across from a park my sisters and I used to visit as children. I have a distinct memory of leaving the park one day, looking up the hill and thinking, "I wish I lived in one of those houses."  

Wish granted, my friends. 

And they lived happily ever after.

But maybe not all the time. Like any house that's 70 years old, our home requires a little patience sometimes.

The windows are original, and leaf particles literally blow through their unsealed edges. The wooden doors and windows swell and stick in the humidity. The garbage disposal has quirks, and so does the kitchen sink. You get the idea.  

Last year, we invested in a waterproofing system for the basement. It stopped the perpetual flooding in our son's bedroom, and we were so relieved. Then the basement flooded in a brand new location last week.

Two days later, the waterproofing spray we used to seal cracks outside created an odor so intense inside the house that we needed to open the windows. But the windows - those beautiful, original wooden windows - were swollen in the humidity and wouldn't open. 

When even my 15-year-old son couldn't open them, I climbed onto the countertop and pulled on the window with all my strength. Tugging fruitlessly in a fuzzy, inhalant-fogged state, I screamed, “I HATE this house!” 

(I know. I know.)

Of course the truth is that I do not hate this house. I love this house with its original floors and arched doorways and streaming sunlight through abundant windows. I love the fireplace and the warmth. I love how it has always felt exactly like home. 

I love this house because it's the literal fulfillment of my childhood dreams. 

And as it turns out, sometimes even a dream-come-true needs maintenance, attention, and work. 

Sometimes the dream comes with work to do. 

In couples counseling, I often tell clients we've been taught the wrong thing about love and marriage. Movies tell us if it's true love, it shouldn't take much work. They tell us if it's meant to be, it won't require maintenance, or attention. 

But the truth is that anything valuable - even the answer to our prayers - requires effort. And if we're not doing the work to maintain it, we might find ourselves forgetting it was our dream come true in the first place.  

With literal storms on the horizon here, we've been putting in the work to prepare our home and protect it from more flooding today. Maybe it'll work, and maybe we'll be up late with towels and the shop vac again. Either way, we're putting in the work because we love this home. And that makes even the wettest nights worth the effort. (Remind me of that later just in case, ok?) 

Happily enough ever after, 

Becki 

The Truth about Parenting

(My tiny babies)

Next week, Aidan and Chloe start their second year of high school and middle school, respectively.  

Sometimes when I think of my kids, I forget how much they've grown. I remember instead the little people I gave birth to and nursed and rocked to sleep. The people I swaddled and snuggled and threw birthday parties for year after year. The people who are now measuring taller and almost taller than I am. 

They're still kids, but they're growing up, too - and I never know how to put those two things together. 

Last week, Aidan passed the test to get his learner's permit (the first step toward driving here in WV), and I was so excited for him until I realized something: 

My kid will be driving...which means I'll see a lot less of him soon. They start driving, and eventually they drive away, right? All of a sudden "eventually" seems a little too close. 

In June we went on vacation to Alabama. The condo we visited had a beautiful saltwater pool, and we went swimming every day. Every day, I saw moms of toddlers bring their little ones to swim and felt a little wistful. Taking tots to the pool is an exercise in patient attention: slathering babies in sunscreen, outfitting them with floaties and puddle jumpers, and chasing them around the periphery of the pool while shouting, "Slow down, honey!" As I watched those mamas, I suddenly missed having little ones. 

But then again I didn't. 

To be honest, my own kids hardly needed watching at all. I let them apply their own sunscreen and bring their own towels and only told them "careful" when their pool play turned into all-out warfare. I watched them swim on their own and didn't worry about whether they were getting overtired or sunburned or too close to the deep end. 

I didn't worry at all. 

And from where I stand now, I can already see that every stage of parenting has its own challenges and its own beauty. When they were little, my kids snuggled and talked and clung to me more, and I loved those moments. But they also needed more attending, more monitoring and care and intervention. At this age, they get silent sometimes and snuggle far less. But they also make their own lunches and wash their own hair, and although they may talk less, the truth is we converse more. 

I remember the early days of motherhood, longing to have an adult conversation with another human being when Darryl was at work. Now, I can have those conversations with my kids. 

I've heard it said that to look at your child is to see a vision of the past, present, and future all at once. 

And every piece of that vision has its own pain and its own joy. 

(Even the piece when your baby boy starts driving.) 

Feeling all the feelings today, 

Becki 

Ordinary Things

This morning I was watching Leave It to Beaver (don't be jealous of my glam life). In case you've never seen the show (because maybe you're not into classic TV or you've been living in a bunker or something), allow me to briefly summarize it for you. Leave It to Beaver tells the story of little brother Beaver's incessant shenanigans and older brother Wally's punishment from their parents because if he'd been keeping a better eye on Beaver, their sweet little boy would never have gotten into said shenanigans. 

(Can you tell I'm a firstborn?) 

Anyway, in today's episode Beaver and Wally got high-paying jobs working for the circus. (No, seriously.) As Beaver described the excitement of cleaning the horses and mucking out the stalls, his parents looked at each other with knowing skepticism. And, of course (spoiler alert!), they were right.  

What I noticed about Beaver's description of cleaning animal stalls and scrubbing down horses, though, was this: He talked about what they would "get to" do at their job. 

Get to. Not have to. 

Ten years ago this week, Chloe got sick. What started as a simple virus quickly transformed into something terrifying and life-threatening, and she was hospitalized for what felt like an eternity (but was actually more like a week). At the hospital, we lived in a haze of uncertainty, anxiety, and exhaustion. 

One of my clearest memories of that week is of Darryl and myself standing at the window in Chloe's room, numbly staring out at the gray city. As I stood there, all I could feel was a longing to be home again - a longing for ordinary life. Hearing the shouts of children fighting over a toy. Washing piles of laundry, blotting stolen nail polish out of the carpet, spreading peanut butter on bread, all on repeat, repeat, repeat. 

My dream was to go home with my daughter - to get to do it all again. 

And then earlier this year, I had two totally unrelated surgeries within two months of each other. Recovering from the second one, I felt discouraged and found myself again longing for ordinary things. I made a list of goals for when I was feeling better in an effort to improve my spirits. At the time, they felt outrageously audacious: 

Maintain a tidy house. 

Feed the dogs on a schedule. 

Start running again. 

Keep up with laundry. 

Cook dinner. 

Meet with clients every week. 

Gratefully, I'm back to doing those things on a more or less regular basis. My wildly audacious goals have become routine again. Ordinary. Mundane. Unnoticed. 

Unappreciated. 

And I guess I needed Beaver to remind me what life has shown me over and over: 

Ordinary things are sacred. 

In moments of extraordinary pain, they're the things we miss the most. And remembering that today, maybe we don't need trauma to remind us to appreciate the small stuff. 

Maybe we just need Wally's annoying little brother. 

Getting to Wash the Breakfast Dishes, 

Becki 

About the Mess

Yesterday I had a bit of a low blood sugar at bedtime, which isn't really unusual for me. If you've never had a low blood sugar, basically your body goes on high alert and orders you to eat right this second. Anything in sight is fair game. 

I've had lows so low before that I blacked out a bit and came back to myself with a dirty spoon in my hand and a weird taste in my mouth, but no clue what I'd actually eaten. I once ate an entire container of CoolWhip without remembering it. And I once panicked and tried to jump out a first-floor window instead of eating anything at all. But I digress. 

*ahem* 

Yesterday I had just a little low. 

In my mildly foggy-headed state, I calmly searched the refrigerator for a healthy but carb-filled snack. All of a sudden for no reason at all, a bowl of kale salad fell to the floor and spilled across the room. (That wasn't the carb-filled snack I was looking for.) 

Immediately I thanked Jesus that it didn't land on my foot and started to clean it up. Probably in response to my positive attitude, tiny bluebirds flew into the room and began nibbling on the kale and tweeting a cheerful song. Friendly mice, hearing the music, danced into the room and scrubbed the floor with PineSol, twirling rolls of paper towels behind them. 

Or maybe that's not exactly what happened. 

Maybe in my foggy but frantic low state, my mind was shouting, "EAT, FOOL, EAT!" And my refrigerator, overstuffed because I store leftovers on top of leftovers, saw me weak and seized the opportunity to be nasty. Maybe I clumsily knocked over a heavy bowl of salad, stored precariously atop another bowl of leftover meatballs, onto the floor and right in front of my big toe. 

Maybe I did thank Jesus in my head that it didn't break my toe. (Or maybe I said it out loud because anymore who even knows? I talk to myself and Jesus out loud constantly, all social skills out the window.) And immediately after that, I may have said, "Becki, you fool, why are you so clumsy? How long are you going to be like this?? Here you are 43 years old and still can't open the refrigerator without spilling something everywhere..." And I might have raved on and on at myself. 

Maybe the commotion was so loud and so violent that my teenaged son heard me from the basement, heard me even with his headphones on, even with the music and friend chat of Fortnite or Minecraft or who-knows-what (moms of teens, please say you can relate to never knowing what your kids are actually doing) and ran up the stairs to save me. And maybe his sister emerged from her room, too, just to be sure the house wasn't on fire. 

And maybe they helped me clean up the kale salad with the delicious but messy peanut-sesame dressing, and they made sure their mama was ok, and they asked if I needed any more help before they went back to their video games. 

And maybe I mumbled, "No," and thanked them and just ate a glucose tablet (basically a giant piece of sugar-flavored chalk) instead of eating everything in the refrigerator, and went to bed more or less ok with being a total mess. 

Because even if I am a total mess, at least I have people around willing to help fix me up a little. And that might be even better than birds and mice who clean and sew. (Or maybe both might be nice, but I'll take what I can get.)

Messy but blessed or something, 

Becki 

The Trick to Happiness

Last week I bought our lab-hound mix, Finn, a different kind of food. Before I poured it into his dish, I spent some time talking it up a bit so he'd give it a fair chance. Finn knows the word "food," and he's a typical lab, so naturally he started to wiggle and made this face:

He stayed happy until I opened the bag and poured the food into his bowl. At that moment, he realized it wasn't his usual mix of kibble with actual dried beef. Instead, it was a pale, crunchy mix whose only resemblance to meat was the bone-shaped bits. In an instant, his happiness evaporated. 

This week in church, the readings were about Israel in the desert and their reaction to hunger. It's always amazed me that God literally rained bread from heaven onto the grass in front of them, and they ate it happily enough until someone asked, "Yeah, but. . . where's the beef?" 

The bread of angels poured down from the sky, but it wasn't enough to keep them happy. 

And I guess that's the tricky thing about happiness. The moment the endorphins die off, the happiness wanes, and we're left wondering why it’s never quite enough. 

After all, if happiness depends on bread or meat (or meat-flavored kibble for all my dog readers), it's going to elude us at some point. 

The truth is, happiness is one emotion on the color wheel of feelings we experience. Sadness, loneliness, anger, joy, anticipation - they all have a place in our lives. Even Jesus cried sometimes. 

And I wonder sometimes - if we were always happy, how rich would our lives really be? 

Think for a moment about your most difficult season in life. What really helped you get through that time? Was it the taste of rich food, the warmth of wine, the pursuit of money? 

Or was it the voice of a friend on the other end of the line - the simple reassurance that you weren't alone even in pain? 

So maybe happiness isn't what makes life worth living. Maybe, in the end, it's connection.

Happiness can connect us to others, but those moments when we feel most connected, most supported, most loved - might also be the toughest moments of our lives.

And listen, friends: If even a dog can't be happy all the time, what makes us think we can? If happiness goes up when we're eating steak and down when we're eating bologna, is it really what life is all about? 

Maybe a better pursuit would be contentment: shifting our thoughts from not-enough to it's-enough. 

And maybe that simple change could, in the end, make our lives just happy enough. 

Enough for Today Anyway, 

Becki