In This Moment

The prompt for this week's JOURNAL 52 page is "Build a Snowman" and here's what I came up with:

"I choose to be happy in this moment."

As I was cutting up the scrapbook paper to make my snowman, I was thinking about what I said in my last post...about how time passes so quickly and how sometimes things go from good to bad or bad to good in a split second.

A couple nights ago, my mom called me at around eleven o'clock.  I knew something was wrong immediately because my mom is NEVER awake that late and, if she is, she's not capable of functional thought...so there's no way she's calling me at eleven to chit chat.  I was right.

My nephew, Remy, who is two, had fallen off the bed earlier that night and gotten a concussion.  Mom had just gotten home from the hospital, where they had decided to keep him overnight for tests and observation, hence the late night call.

I spent the night staring at the ceiling in the blackness of my bedroom with a knot in my stomach the size of a small elephant.

Mom and I went to see him in the hospital yesterday, and he's doing better...much less of a limp noodle, apparently, than the last time she saw him (and if you knew Remy, you'd know that's the last thing he could ever be described as under normal circumstances).  

While we were there, he was trying to convince us to let him get out of the hospital bed...or go to Mugga's (aka my Mom's) house...or go outside...and then he was using the board on his arm (it keeps the arm straight for the IV) to "Hulky smash" the teddy bears people had given him.  Those are promising signs of him feeling better for sure, so hopefully he will get to come home today.

Usually, I have a melancholy feeling when I think about the fact that I will probably never have a kid...but this whole experience made me realize that there are also some good things about it too.  Because even though I love Remy (and my other nephews and nieces) SO MUCH, I know it can't compare to how much their moms love them.  And when I think about the gut wrenching feeling I had when I heard what happened this weekend, I can't imagine having to feel that for my own child...I really, strongly feel like I couldn't handle that pain.  

I realized that if I did have a kid, I would wrap him or her in bubble wrap and a helmet at all times and never let them do anything because I would be terrified that something bad would happen to them.  And they would probably hate me for it and grow up resenting me and write terrible, scathing things about me in their memoirs or become serial killers or something.  So maybe the no-kid-for-me thing is kind of a good thing...

So I was thinking about that as I was cutting up the paper for my snowman, and I started wondering what other things in my life are like that?  What other things (that I view as negative) also have a positive side?  

It turns out that there are quite a few...  I guess I'm much more of a pessimist than I thought.

I don't want to be a pessimist.  

I could walk around all doom and gloom because Remy had an accident and because life is scary and think of all the horrible things that could happen at any given moment.  Or I could be happy because Remy is going to be OK and because life is beautiful and think of all the good things that can happen at any moment.

I choose to be happy.