Bliss of Life

Life is pretty damn good over here. It may be the calm before the storm of moving all our belongings from point A to point B, which is fine.  We rode one stormy effin’ wave getting the house ready to sell, so I’ll enjoy the calm.  And I am stronger than any storm that comes our way, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have wreckage to clean up. Getting the house ready to sell put all sorts of stress on my relationship with Lily.  Selling the house coincided with sickness in the forms of colds, stomach bugs and us pulling Lily out of school because she just didn’t like it.  During that time she started studying at my face asking, “You happy, Mama?”  The first time she did it, I swear I felt my heart sink lower in my chest.   The depth of her question was not lost on me.

At this point in her life, I am almost her whole world and she just learned how to check the weather forecast by looking at my face.  I wish I could say something else, but usually she asked if I was happy at pivotal moments when she was leveraging all her two-year-old forces against whatever task I was trying to complete.  My answers weren’t always mature.  Sometimes I would just say no, which was honest.  Other times when she asked me why I wasn’t happy, I said I’m not happy because you keep  ______ and I’m trying to get ______ done. I am a smart woman, fully aware of cause and effect.  I know the long-term lesson attached to that response, but in the moment, that crappy statement was the best I could do.  Today I was in the kitchen making a kale salad when Lily ran up to me and asked, “You happy Mama?” I was actually, so I said, “Yes, but that has nothing to do with you, honey.”

At some point I’ll explain to her that happiness is a personal choice.  Sometimes it’s an easy one and other times it’s not, but it never has anything to do with anyone else but you.  That lesson may come sooner than I thought.