Lessons in Joy

Summer has started and I have so many bits and pieces of thoughts going through my head.  I'm symptom-free and find myself happily occupied with cleaning and laundry and taking the girls to swimming and trumpet and hanging out with friends and having long conversations with my husband about our life together...  just living.

I am completely enamored with it all.

I'm watching my children grow up right in front of me.  I'm witnessing their personalities emerge and I'm listening to them wrestle with the questions of life; and in the next minute, I get to watch them run around the yard collecting fireflies in jars, giggling unabashedly and forgetting they're too old to act like that.

I hope they get to keep that.  Life tries so hard to steal that kind of joy and replace it with some counterfeit... calling it "dignity" or "maturity".  I'm finding there's a beautiful kind of dignity that comes from joy like that.  Sometimes I think we equate maturity with severity... as if joy is a symptom of ignorance.  Someone who is joyful cannot possibly be living in reality.

My children are not often concerned with what happened when they were little.  They don't remember much of it, and what they do remember is mostly happy.  They don't worry too much about what might happen in the future, because, for now, their daddy and I have that responsibility.  They think about today.  Because, it's here right now.  Why not find a way to enjoy it?

As I write this, Abby is in the basement practicing her trumpet.  She will, inevitably, arise from the basement bemoaning the fact that she sounds like a "dying elephant" when she plays.  (And, she does.) But I listen, and I think of how well she'll be able to play by the end of the year and how she may go on to other instruments and how one day she may get a scholarship to college because of her musical prowess...  And then I realize she won't be practicing in my basement anymore.  And suddenly, the dying elephant is making the most beautiful music I've ever heard.  It's the music of this day, this moment... The inexpressible joy of being a mom and a wife... The realization that all that she will one day become has had something to do with this time she's spent with me.  Wow.