“I’m in the good part.”
Those words formed first in my mind, then into a whisper on my lips. I’m in the good part.
Sitting comfortably with a hot coffee in my right hand, while my left was busy, gently sharing sips of water with my 10-month-old boy, his innocent gaze fixed on me as if absorbing every ounce of love and care I could offer.
My little family of five relaxed at a pine table enjoying eggs, bacon, biscuits, pancakes, sitting between walls with scattered old-timey photos, and the low hum of Saturday morning conversations at tables around us.
In this moment of calm, all of the sound in my ears seemed to become faint and those words in my head felt audible.
I am so thankful for these pockets of sunshine. And not because I’m unrealistic or naive to the relentlessness of parenting and life at home.
Knowing the easy or idealistic parts of family life like this are only little blips in our reality doesn’t diminish my joy.
In fact, as I turn it over in my head I decide it’s definitely the tension between the easy and the hard that keeps the special, easier moments of rest and play together worth noticing.
In my teens, I looked ahead and planned for only ease and happiness. I wanted days of importance and also, weightlessness.
The absence of mundanity, ordinary living, quiet decisions; I wanted 8 figures yearly to support an imaginary life of play and only doing the work that I wanted, when I wanted.
Day turned to night, night into day, over and over and now I’m 29 with three kids and my life isn’t weightless play and endless ease.
Instead, I was given right now.
A reality of being needed even when I don’t want to be anymore.
A pile of laundry, dishes to load at the end of the night, lots of ordinary decisions.
And somehow… I’ve found it’s better than that imaginary life of only highs.
I’ve learned that I love tension between the harder parts of living and the moments of ease.
I don’t believe I could fully appreciate my own life if it lacked contrast.
The work helps me anticipate and appreciate rest. The rest gives me joy to work.
Perhaps it’s similar to my love of light and shadow together in my home, in my photos: this tension adds depth, contrast, and ultimately, beauty.
The ordinariness of some days, or the struggles of others don't diminish the happiness in these easier, seemingly idyllic instances; rather, they accentuate it.
"I'm in the good part." This thought captured an understanding I’m finally getting to in my adult years.
The good part isn’t about not having the harder or more ordinary parts of life anymore.
I’m cooking dinners and wiping down the same table at least 5 times a day.
The good part isn’t having every longing satisfied, every prayer answered, every hurt healed up.
We’re nearly two years into living in a space that was supposed to be only a transition moment for us, a few months here. Instead, I don’t know when we’ll build that home we dreamed up together.
The good part is a change inside me.
I thought the good part was going to start once certain things happened on the outside. That maid I’ve always wanted to hire, she’d be a part of it.
And my dishes wouldn’t be in a stinky day old pile when my friend drops by with barely any notice during an especially sleepless week.
I used to think the good part was a season, or set of circumstances.
On a train traveling through Europe with Matthias by my side, years before we had children, I found myself being transformed by the writing of Victor Frankl.
His book Man’s Search For Meaning is one that should likely stay on all of our yearly reading rotations.
I don’t have the language to describe what he did for my heart, so I won’t waste my words. Instead, I’ll share share some of his:
“everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
It feels almost wrong to be strengthened in my breezy life by the brave words of a man who lived through the cruel reality of Auschwitz.
But truly, his understanding of life reshaped mine.
I’m not looking to create a life of only high moments; instead I’m leaning in and paying attention to how my joy and weariness can coexist in a day.
Over the course of writing this afternoon, my baby ripped the beautiful leaves off one of my favorite house plants and I felt personally offended.
Then he dumped over a box of crackers, making a crumby mess that honestly made my insides feel high-pitched and screechy.
But as I swept it up, that knowing was still there. I’m in the good part.
In a world that often glorifies the extraordinary and seeks to escape the mundane, embracing the tension between the two has become my weapon to fight for my own contentment.
I don’t have to chase it.
It’s not on the other side of having a perfectly organized schedule and routine.
It’s not on the other side of this to-do list or that dream.
It’s not in the house we want to build.
“It is what we make of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one man from another.” said Nelson Mandela.
And I think to myself, I’m in the good part, as I take another sip of my coffee.