July 17th, 2004
December 31st, 2005
August 2nd, 2009
July 24th, 2010
Today
Honeymoon in Jamaica 2004Mexico family trip Christmas 2005San Diego Sibling Trip 2009The crowd of friends and fun at Eli's 4th birthday party at Castaway
Some of the hardest days of my life
These are the dates of just a few of the hardest days of my life. Before anyone starts feeling too much sympathy for me, or your worry needlessly builds, let me explain. If I can find the energy, if my tears don’t seep through onto the keyboard and short circuit things, and if my general blah-ness will subside, I’ll explain.
For me, some of the hardest days are the days when good things end. When time has passed and taken with it all the hopes, anticipation, and experiences of the last set of days, the collection of moments, the experiences of greatness and the most ordinary. When all that remains is a suitcase of dirty and clean clothes all smashed and mixed together, the smells of airplane or roadtrip on my hair, hands, and shirt, and all of the real life things I’ve been avoiding. Gone is the excitement of packing for fun events like the out of town wedding, the tropical vacay, or the month on assignment at a Young Life camp. Over are the experiences with family, deep and honest. Finished are the experiences with new friends- fresh, suprising, exciting, and stimulating. Past are the moments in nature, in beauty, of adventure, relaxation, connection, grace, hope, and joy that comes when you leave home, abandon normal, exit status quo, and enter somewhere else with others that are not usually in your world.
When I leave, I am most alive. When I take a break from my everyday world, I am refreshed. I learn new things about myself and my family whether I am in heated and probing conversations with people who know me best, or if I’m all by myself, in the mountains, in a bedroom with a book, or on a beach. I can see and hear and taste and learn different things while I’m away, but most of all I most always have a lot of fun, experience a ton of joy, and feel as though I’m in the middle of life at it’s fullest.
And then it ends.
So today, I’m back from 6 days of Colorado: family, skiing, sledding, eating, Superbowl partying, grandparent appreciating, eating, relaxing, playing, and snowing. The time was rich and despite the long length of days for a non-holiday trip in the middle of the winter, it was far too short.
So now I’m home and those mixed clothes suitcases sit untouched. It was all I could do to feed my children two meals and make sure they wore socks when we left the house. I completed obligatory work agenda items with the attention they deserved but without my usual zeal. I was grieving. I was living into what I know about myself: that transition days, days when something wonderful ends, are hard days and that just laying on the couch and remembering was probably the best thing I could do with a bit of the afternoon. Anything else and I would have cried.
