I remember one of those cold winter evenings in Michigan, I was walking out of a department store on Christmas Eve with my brother and my Dad. The wind was blowing a thousand miles an hour, the damp air felt like icicles on my eye balls, and I couldn't get to the car fast enough. I ran to the car only to watch my Dad slowly saunter towards us - in no hurry to unlock it, with his coat open and flapping in the wind.
PSYCHO!
The next sentence out of his mouth stuck with me for some reason, even though at the time, it made him even more psycho in my eyes. He said: "You just have to embrace the cold!" while holding his arms up in the air.
It wasn't until years later after my many trials of high school, my many struggles of living in the "real world" post college, and the roller coaster world of the Army did that sentence start to make sense. I realized on "recovery days" during the deployment (ones spent pulling myself out of the deep end as a result of the day before) if I hadn't had cared so much about what my house looked like or if my daughter took a bath, I wouldn't have stressed myself out, I wouldn't have cried myself to sleep, and I wouldn't be dragging myself out of bed trying to muster the strength to try again. If I had just embraced the fact that houses get messy and realized I'm human and given myself a little more allowance to be the tired spouse of a deployed soldier, I maybe would have gone to bed feeling, tired-and proud to be a spouse of a deployed soldier, not stressed and frustrated. My point - don't let the cold get to you. Yes, it gets cold. There is nothing I can do about the weather, there is nothing I can do about the way someone drives their car in front of me, there is nothing I can do about the fire ants that live in the southern half of the United States. I've heard this a lot: "If you don't like something that you can't change, change your attitude about the said thing".
So, the night before the movers come to load our boxes on the truck, Caitlin gets a temperature of 103. She's never had a fever more than about 100. I assume all of our medicine is packed, and without looking at the linen closet, I open one of the boxes that I think should contain the tylenol-no medicine. I am now irritated. 1, because the box I just opened is not marked adequately for my taste now that I know what was in it and 2, because I still don't have tylenol. Hubby suggest that I look in the closet. I do. It's FULL. All of my medicine, pills, liquids, lotions, creams, all still there. Not a single thing packed. Really? I can't move to Alaska with ANY of my cold medicines or baby orajel, I can't even take chapstick! Now I'm really irritated. Chad walked out of the room after saying 3 words: "I'm over it."
Embrace the cold.
It is what it is. Yes, it may be crap. But I can't change crap into gold. I can control how I see crap though. At that moment when you really do let it go and "get over it", the weight lifts off your shoulders, the knots in your stomach loosen, and your vision clears. We'll just be more picky about what we buy when we are in Alaska so we don't run into this issue on such a large scale. Simple enough for me.
Things are much easier to stomach when you embrace the ugly. When the movers still had not loaded a single box on the truck after being in the house for over two hours, I was easily able to say "these guys are nincompoops, at least they aren't in charge of something irreplaceable like my daughter" I was happy to then leave and get coffee without stressing about not being there to watch their every move. I was able to focus on other things, like getting Caitlin out of the house to do something she wanted to do for once in the last 3 days, and coffee. All weekend without my coffee maker was kind of cruel.
Anyway, my point. (I try to always have one). You don't have to like everything that happens to your life. But you do have to acknowledge that it's there. I promise you, acknowledgement is 90% of the battle. Sometimes the other 10% is the acceptance that there is no way around the pain or discomfort or irritation and that will be the hardest to swallow, but it only gets easier once you start doing it. And the freedom you will find in the whole situation is pretty awesome.
Living is easy and joyful when you take the pressure off yourself to do it perfectly. Then you can enjoy lunches on the floor with your husband that look like this and not feel guilty or weird! :)
