Life is in...

Lately I've had the...opportunity...for lack of a better word to see life through so many other people's eyes. Working at a daycare you come across all kinds. There is a mom who has a 1 yr old and a 3 yr old. She is battling stage 4 uterine cancer that has spread. She is doing Chemo twice a week every week for the next 6 months. Her ex-husband and father of her children up and left her and is barely in the picture. I just cannot imagine. I get weary and beaten down by my own hurdles but it is never far from my mind that it could always be worse. I think that thought has kept me sane more times then I can count and it isn't that I feel like I am triumphant over other people's downfalls...not that at all. It's that they inspire me. This mom still goes to work every day. Sick and nauseous and not knowing if she can survive this cancer. She is still working and maintaining normal for her kids. It's shocking. My co-worker Kim passed away this past week from her injuries a severe stroke in the spring left her with. She never regained awareness and her sweet little firecracker, now 3, is without a mom. There is another mom at daycare that is pregnant with her 5th child. The father of all of her children beat her, and this pregnancy is a result of a horrible nightmare of an experience, yet she is seeing it through. Even though she will have 5 children under 6. There's always so much going on around us at any given time. This time of year it's hard not to dwell on our sweet little Jingle Baby and all the promise she held. How she would be 3 with a trundle of curls sweeping her face. Bouncing here and there, the joy she would have brought. So I've decided life is in the most minute things. Life is in chocolate chip pancakes and cheesy eggs. The whirl of the dishwasher and washer preparing for the next days clothes and dishes. In the icy mornings and the frost on your nose. It is in laughter among sisters and the rumpus roar of a baby brother. It is in the cracks in a marriage that have been mended back together carefully, painfully, and the choice to not let them reappear by polishing it every day. Maintenance. Love. Persistence. Patience. It is in grumpy moods and silly fights. The push and pull and twist in turn. It is in the small moments. Because there is peace there. Fragility. It is also in chunky sweaters and the color orange. In starbucks anything. In family time, in alone time, in sleepy time too. In waking up to big blue eyes ready to pounce on you. To appreciate the smallness in life makes everything seem a little sweeter. A little more sane too, and who couldn't use that...