One of the main components in my healing journey has been learning to appreciate certain things in life. This includes the things I don’t like.

As a child, through adolescence and well into adulthood, these two things were one and the same. If I didn’t like something that happened to me, I couldn’t appreciate it. It was through this ignorance that I remained largely stagnant.

This morning, Kim and I decided to have breakfast at Shari’s restaurant in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I like breakfast. Biscuits and gravy, sausage, eggs, hash browns, pancakes, waffles, French toast. If it’s breakfast, I want it on my plate. And because of this, I have discovered that breakfast is quite easy to appreciate. Especially when somebody else makes it for me.

In the middle of breakfast, our 8-year-old daughter sneezed. It wasn’t a normal sneeze either. Her poor little sinuses had been working to get something out for at least 2 hours. They picked a terrible time to do it.

I appreciate breakfast. I appreciate my child. I did not, however, immediately appreciate the mess. I froze. Jasmine froze. Kim dove headfirst into mama mode. She calmly set her silverware down. Then she directed Jasmine to the bathroom to take care of her.

During this 5-minute interlude, I had a little conversation with myself. In my head, of course. I was in public after all.

I won’t give all the tedious details of this conversation. However, the end result was this:

I deeply value Kim’s ability to be a mother. Not only to her children, but to other children as well. And on occasion, a full-grown adult male whose identity I won’t reveal. (For safety and privacy reasons, of course.) I value the privilege I have to witness such a beautiful thing day in and day out. I value my family, and through them, the love that is revealed to me.

I have to take the good with the bad, the happy with the sad, and accept my child for who she is, now and forever. It is through this acceptance that I find beauty and love.

And that is so much better than anything I ever found in the bottle.

Image by Horacio Moura Lula from Pixabay