This Crazy, Beautiful Life

Life is pretty crazy around here.

Tonight it has been really crazy.  My eldest has a stomach ache, my youngest is on a rage filled tirade, and my Goosie who gets caught up in such chaos easily has been a little force to reckon with.

They are upstairs with TJ right now.  He’s putting them to bed.  Because he’s awesome.  Because he went to work all day, and then he offered to make dinner after my crock pot meal didn’t finish in time, and then he put the kids to bed.  Like he always does.

Because I am very lucky.

And I hear my Goosie upstairs right now.  She’s quite upset about something.  She’s sobbing.  I hear her asking T if she can come downstairs and give me a hug.  “I need Mama,” she’s sobbing.

Because I am very lucky.  Because I get to be that Mama.

This life is ridiculous.  Every morning I wake up and I don’t stop.  I can’t eat a bite of food; I can’t read a paragraph; I can’t get anything done at all because at all times, at every single moment, I am needed.

And that’s crazy, and it’s crazy making.  It takes so much to give so much, and to be honest, I don’t feel like I have that much to give to begin with.

And sometimes I come here and I try to write nice little tidy messages about this life.  I try to sum it up and make sense of it.  I try to make it neat and meaningful and succinct.

But life isn’t like that.  Life is about having way too much to do.  It’s about giving away more than you knew you had.  It’s about having a heart that is so full and so vibrant and so heavy and so worn and so alive that it barely fits in your chest.

It’s about crying sometimes.  It’s about crying those bitter sobs of disappointment, and it’s about crying the frustrated tears of chaos, and it’s about crying the sweet tears of joy, and it’s about crying the empty tears that come for no other reason than your eyes need something to do at that moment.

It’s about trying to make sense out of it all, about trying to find our place, carve out our niche, make our impact, but getting so caught up in everything that it’s hard to even remember that there is a place to carve out after all.

It’s about trying to find meaning while living.  It’s about trying to learn to swim in the deep end.  It’s about falling under, having someone pull you back up, and then doing it all over again.

Life is beautiful and it’s complicated, and it’s aggravating, and it’s glorious.

But most of all, it’s holy.

It’s about taking the gifts of our one precious life and doing our best to do it justice.

Life isn’t about pretty little essays.  It’s not about one liners that make sense of it all.

It’s about all the mess and all the chaos and all the holiness all rolled into one.

It’s beautiful.  And it’s broken.

And it surely can’t be one without the other.