Embrace it.

Found this in my drafts from last February, and thought I’d post…

I’ve had a whole bunch of #fails lately.

Bought my nanny a hazelnut coffee; she is deathly allergic to nuts.
Closed my daughter’s pinky in a changing table.
My dog has had a bunch of accidents in the house, which somehow feels like my fault.
I left a plastic container of animal crackers a little too closer to the burner.

My car battery died in the grocery pick-up line.
Had some urgent dental work done.
I fell in my house and couldn’t drive for two days.
Got locked out of my house for an hour.
Got a nail in my tire and needed it patched.

And finally, as of today anyway, my daughter fractured her elbow. She was more upset when they told her not to move her arm than she was when she actually hurt it. “But I just want to move my aaaaarrrrrmmmmm! I’ll move it reawwy swow-wy, I promise!”

(Two weeks later, she and I both got the flu! My husband was gone to an Army school this ENTIRE TIME, by the way).

Aside from learning what a fractured elbow looks like from the outside, the biggest lesson here: EMBRACE IT.

I don’t want to embrace it. I want this Comedy of Errors to stop. I want to tell the writers of whatever tricked-ya TV show I’ve landed myself in to stop writing, joke’s over, I’m tired, we can all go back to our regularly scheduled programming.

But here’s the thing.

Not embracing it means resisting it, and resisting it does no good. It’s happening. It sucks and it’s stupid and it’s exhausting, but it’s happening. And it could be worse. Every one of those could have been worse. And I’ve found that if I embrace each event, I can move past each event, and then when the next one comes along, I’m not still dealing with baggage from the first one that I resisted, because I didn’t resist it, I embraced it, dealt with it, and moved on.

Now, have there been tears? Oh, so many. Late and early nights to bed, whining to supportive friends, and a fair amount of cookies and ice cream? Yes, yes, and yes!

But underneath, I feel solid. I don’t feel cracked or shattered.

Just tired.

Because I’ve embraced.