Hello, how are you?
Lately, I’ve been feeling a lot of gratitude.
I watch my son striving and growing up well, and my heart feels full. He is kind (and cheeky). He is becoming his own person. I don’t take a single day of this for granted.
The beauty of an ordinary day
My days are simple now. Wake up, get ready for work, and walk my kid to school. After work, I pick up my kid, have dinner, hang out, go to bed. Then repeat.
It’s routine. It’s mundane. And it’s drama-free.
For a long time, I thought a good life had to feel exciting. Now I understand that calm is what stability feels like. A quiet home is something I worked for, and I am learning to enjoy it.
The question that still visits me
But I won’t pretend it’s all peaceful.
Sometimes, in the quiet, I wonder: What did I do wrong to not experience pure, gentle, selfless love from another person?
Then I wonder something else. Am I really craving that kind of love? Or am I just longing for something that looks wonderful on a screen?
I don’t have an answer yet. I’m learning to let the question sit without rushing to fix it.
What I didn’t expect
I never expected my child’s father to treat me the way he did after I told him I had decided to leave the marriage. He had become a different person, running on survival mode. Still, it hurt, and it took time to accept that hurt is not the same as failure.
I’m learning that a marriage ending does not mean I am unworthy of love. Will I ever encounter that?
If you’re in a similar place
If you’re walking through something like this, I’d like to tell you what got me through the worst years in my 30s.
My child was my anchor.
On the worst days, I thought about getting him ready for school with clean school clothes, making sure he has yummy snacks and enough milk, and ample sleep. Those small tasks gave me the reason to keep going. They still do.
You don’t have to have everything figured out. You just need one steady thing to hold onto. For me, it was my child. For you, it may be something else. Hold on to it. Better days do come, and they’re often quieter than we expected.
I had to be gentle with myself, you for yourself too.
What has been your anchor during a hard season?
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