Calm Amongst the Chaos

I don’t know how “normal” I am. I don’t think that my mind operates like others. I’m not saying it is good, nor bad, just not normal. I live in a grey world. I know there is right and there is wrong, but the line is not made with a black sharpie all over my dining room table. Or figuratively either. I live in my world, the one that everything that happens is a lesson to be learned. I exhaust myself trying to figure out why that person in the pick up line cut me off and her license plate said “carma”. My mind is never ending running reel. I think of my life as a movie, I even have the soundtrack and often wonder how the story ends.
I can’t take a story that I hear and not try to put it into practice somehow. I take signs. I take signals and try to figure out what I am supposed to do with each one. Maybe that lady cut me off because God wanted me to practice patience. Or maybe he wanted me to have a good chuckle when I read her license plate. Maybe he was working on starving people in Africa and wasn’t paying attention. But that is just an example of how my mind works. I’m a dreamer, but not in a magical world with lollipops and gummy bears. I try to take the poop and see if I can’t at least sugar coat it enough to at least look less like poop.
This summer has been a never ending season of tears, anger, fear and frustration. Sure a few smiles from my amazing kids, but for the most part it’s been sweat and tears. Literally, it is an Arizona summer. I’ve put on here some struggles and I choose not to put up others. I’ve learned a lesson with blogging and as much as I enjoy airing out the dirty laundry, I will not. Just understand this summer has been probably the hardest season I have ever had to deal with. Not one particular thing, but a snowball of things that leaves my mind reeling. Wondering. Dreaming. And I’m trying to put into perspective what am I supposed to take from this and where do we go from here? I am still doing this and that is why I have not come here to “talk”. My handy notebook with handwritten notes is where my heart has been going lately and when I am dead you all have yourself a movie for gosh darn sure. But in all seriousness, I want to not look back on the summer of 2010 and think God that sucked. I want to look back and say God that sucked, but I am so glad that I took this away from that and now I can apply it to my fall of 2012, or whatever. I obviously am someone who gets it you can’t have the sweet with out the sour. Yup, got it. It’s literally written in ink on my wrist, “make lemonade”, but I need something deeper. I need to fully understand why this so we can have that. So I may not be the coolest blogger out there and my apologies, but I’ve never been cool. Ever. So I really don’t mind not getting that award.
After all that ramblings there is a life lesson I learned that I wanted to share. It’s been on my mind for weeks now since sweet Emmie’s funeral. Something I have a hard time sharing without immediately swelling up with tears. I do not feel comfortable sharing other people’s stories, especially about something as delicate as this. I feel like sharing a story that isn’t my own is not my business, but when Emmie’s parents shared a story with us at the funeral it was something so profound that I carry with me everywhere I go and I hope no one would mind my sharing.
Emmie’s dad spoke about their recent vacation, a cruise, and one day Emmie’s dad wanted to take her swimming so he carried her to the pool, but found it awkward to get in while holding her. A stranger saw him and said, “Can I hold your daughter for you so you can get in and I’ll hand her to you”. He used his help, swam with Emmie for 30 minutes and the entire time the man stood there with his son and waited for them and helped him take her out of the pool. That’s the story that was shared, amongst many other beautiful stories. This one I particularly took to heart because who knows how that mans day was going previously. Maybe it was a bad day? Maybe good? We’ll never know where that mans heart was, but I am pretty sure he had no idea what gift he gave this family. I don’t think he knew that a few weeks later the story would be shared at that sweet sweet angel’s funeral. He probably thought it was a simple task that anyone would do, but honestly I don’t think many would. He might have thought it was something simple, insignificant, yet now this dad will always have the memory of swimming with his daughter on vacation and not of wanting to swim with her but couldn’t because of her handicap. He will remember the goodness in a stranger and will share that story so all of us can think twice the next time we want to stop to help someone, but are in a hurry. Or we figure someone else will do it. Or we don’t really want to take the time to just stop what we’re doing. Maybe after hearing this story we stop making excuses and just do.
It just proves how with every struggle we face in life we have to find out why we have these struggles. It isn’t easy.
Just Friday night I cried myself to sleep because I wanted nothing more than my daughter to beg me for an itouch or a cell phone or hell Justin Beiber tickets for her 8th birthday. But she didn’t. She never asked me for a single thing. I still struggle with one of the biggest life lessons in my daughter, but I am doing better. I let myself feel sorry for what should be, but on Saturday 8/28/10 we celebrated the best gift, the best lesson I’ve ever had and that was the 8th birthday of our special LilyAnna Blu.
I try to put positive twists on everything and I will always continue to do that because I will not be someone who will muddle through life just surviving. I will learn until the day I die and I will share my lessons with my children and hopefully my grandkids and yes they will think I am crazy, but they will one day appreciate it and hopefully some of them with think just like me and continue to learn and teach their own lessons.