While brushing my teeth, a realization arrives so quickly that I spit, fast, wipe the errant toothpaste on my bath towel and tiptoe in my house shoes down the hall to the kitchen, and I write this:
I have been evaluating my good days all wrong.
Nightly, I write a simple daily recap in my journal. It is a going-on-two-year tradition, a way to spotlight the small and to write down the good. “Spent my day off skiing. Divy was at school; Martin said, “You ski like a goddess, you can ski anywhere in the back country with a little bit of time and concentration.”
I sometimes look back at previous years to see patterns, routines, habits I no longer keep – some I miss; others I’m happy to have left behind.
For a season, I would draw a star next to the great-great-great days, the over-the-top days where the sun beams and birds sing and there isn’t a tantrum in sight, for any of us.
A string of starred days marked last summer – mountain biking trips, parades, al fresco dinners with beer and pizza. I remember these days well.
But this winter, I am having a hard time finding the stars. The deadlines have piled and I have let myself become overworked, overwrought. It hasn't snowed in weeks it seems, and Martin and I have been playing hot-potato with Divy – You’ve got him tomorrow morning, right? OK, I’ll take the afternoon – and last month when we stole a rare date night together, I slid into the seat of a ramen eatery and said, Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in forever!
I am inclined to call these bad days, but I am wrong.
Bad vs. good is not the same as hard vs. easy. I have starred my easy days, cloaking them in my memory as simple, fun, happy, productive, efficient. Good.
But the good days, too, are the ones where we grow, where we struggle, where we learn, where we fight. Where we fall into bed after the world has fallen apart, where the capitol is stormed because of fraud, while we went skiing, for sleep and restoration. The good days are the ones where we get up in the morning to face another day, fry another egg, clean another bedpan. They are ripe with persistence and endurance and patience and grace and forgiveness and love, even when it’s the kind through clenched teeth.
Especially when it’s the kind through clenched teeth.
They’re all good days.
They’re all new days.
I will look at this star-less season next year. I will scan the pages and smile, remembering habits and routines I no longer keep, a shedding of old skin. I will have grown. I will have endured.
It will have been very, very good.
