Sunshine and Rainbows

We just returned from two glorious weeks at a cottage.

I never thought I would type a sentence like that one (at least not unless it was a work of fiction).

In one sentence I wrote two weeks + cottage + we = glorious

Don't get me wrong - it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows

But there was an abundance of sunshine, laughter, good food and cuddles

There were splash fights at the beach and helping our seven year old to rediscover his love of the water

There were arguments and tears and sullen silences as well

There was even quite a bit of melodrama and anxiety over some unresolved issues with a beloved summer camp and our oldest boys crushed spirit

But I stood back at one point and I took some deep breaths

And I remembered back to one year ago when we were so afraid we had lost our son forever to the depths of mental illness

And I realized how glorious my life is right now

And I tried not to let the waves of regret hit me too hard as I realized the years that we had spent drowning in the crisis of each day, barely surviving let alone thriving, had robbed me of just spending time with my children and husband.

The years of anxiety and advocacy - fighting tooth and nail for every speck of service I thought I could even remotely scrounge for my child and our family. The training, the reading, the researching, the phone calls, emails and meeting after meeting.

It had consumed who I was

And I let it stop me from flying kites and making sand castles. I allowed it to take all my energy so that my kids had never made a pizza at home, we rarely played games anymore and I had never taught my youngest how to build houses and towers out of cards

So we went on vacation and every day we curled up and read. We played for hours at the beach. We made 27 paper airplanes (and not just plain old airplanes but really complicated ones that I was determined to figure out how to make from confusing directions in a book). We made pizza TWICE and I took pictures.And my youngest showed me how determined he is by spending hours perfecting his technique at building card houses.

One night we sat around the table, eating Taco's as my husband and my boys talked and laughed. I wiped tears from my eyes.

THIS. This was what it was all about. I willed myself to take mental snapshots of this moment. THIS was what years of painful, heartbreaking and life threatening infertility treatments had been about. THIS is what the adoption classes and piles of paperwork had been about. THIS is what I had been fighting for so long for.

A family

My family

 

 mom2spiritedboys is the mother of two very spirited boys and is now embracing extreme parenting in the trenches after trying to fight it for many years. She is married to a wonderful man who works hard to ignore the state of disrepair of their home and made her the happiest woman on earth when he took over laundry duty in its entirety in September 2009. You can read more from her at her personal blog Spirited Blessings