Make This Beautiful

Each night feels like Groundhog Day. The same fatigue. The same insurmountable housework, kid obligations, my work, a vicious cycle of laundry, neverending meals to prepare. The season is slowly changing in my home. Now I have a teenager and a pre-teen, and the baby fat on my youngest keeps melting away and nobody wants to go to playgrounds anymore. I remember thinking when I first found myself alone with a 13-month-old, 3-year-old, and a 6-year-old that when they got older, then it would get easier. When the three drop-offs in the morning and three pick-ups in the afternoons and daycare bills and diapers went away, then it’d be Easy Street.

Yet that isn’t how life works, and it’s a huge flaw in our path to happiness if we create conditions for when we can start enjoying our lives. The thing is, if you wait for everything to get easier, you overlook a little detail about being alive: the neverending journey navigating the ups and downs, which do not end until you are dead. Waiting for the conditions to be perfect sets you up for failure. The conditions are rarely ideal.

Inevitably, stress will disappear and leave behind empty pockets for new stress to fill, and boy do we find ways to open the floodgates to more stress. Our attention becomes monopolized by whatever is currently bothering us the most. These overwhelming moments of anxiety remind me that “this” is what I have to work with, and I can either choose to grapple with it until my exhaustion and defeat, or I can think strategically about how I respond and find ways to be grateful for what I have right now, minimizing the damage and looking for what I can find in the silver lining of every situation.

When the new year began, my goal for the year was to “make this beautiful.” Whatever “this” is. On a rough day or on a perfect day and everything in between.

I was recently inspired by a blogger who I used to follow. She had a baby who was born with Down Syndrome the same month I had my first born who was delivered prematurely and spent two months in the NICU. At the time, I could relate to some of her feelings of dashed expectations about not bringing home the newborn you expected. As time went on, I couldn’t relate to her anymore with her big home in Naples, husband, picture-perfect birthday parties she threw for her kids, how she seemed to be on a dreamy beach everyday-especially as I toiled with only parenthood after my husband died. I stopped following her. I didn’t need another person to resent. Within the last year, I discovered she got divorced, lost the big house, moved out of state, and she’s rebuilding her life in Michigan. I find her more relatable. Still, she continues with the little bits of sparkle she’s always done since she had that unexpected baby in 2010. She does silly things like chalk drawings and buying bright picture frames and obsessing over small details like a cozy lamp in her kitchen. It looks trivial on the surface, but you know what, why not? Why shouldn’t we look for little ways to make us happy? More color. More cute. More silly. In a world full of suffering, we should lean in to cozy. I think we never really know anyone in our lives. This is especially true for the people we “know” online. We only see one dimension. So many people appear to be happy and thriving on the surface, only to find out they are miserable and living a completely different life. I’ve lived long enough to witness it with several people. What I do know is I can respect people who don’t pretend. The ones who are willing to share that they are suffering too, but they are trying to make it better. People who choose to make this beautiful even though it is messy.

Here it is the end of February, and I’m still sifting through the existential angst of how to make this beautiful, even when I’m neck deep in the mud. I suspect it’s an ongoing process to train our minds to shift our perspective when it starts feeling tough. I also think perspective shifting can happen in the small things that we do for ourselves. These little touches might be the recipe for making this beautiful.

I haven’t written an essay here since November, which is quite a while for me since I began regularly writing them in 2016. I think part of what might make something more beautiful is ending what Einstein called the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again. What this really means, I think, is that we change things up and look for the ways we might be able to have a huge impact with small shifts in how we approach life. I’ve been trying to push myself to work on what I think is important to me, but never gets priority on my to-do list. I’ve been writing, but in other ways, like plugging away on a short story idea I want to eventually submit to contests. I also finished a 64,000 word novel I had been working on since my husband died-the kernel of an idea he had-a labor of love and imagination, creating a make-belief world that he had a tiny part of, proving to myself that I could finish something big and hard for him, and at the same time keep that connection with him in a world where that portal is rapidly closing. I also started a graduate course in Mahayana texts, and a lot of my spare crumbs of free time have gone to reading for the class. I’m trying new things. There are growing pains. It is messy.

And there is no way to avoid the insanity of parenting, especially only parenthood. I’m trying to break intergenerational cycles of unhealthy patterns. I’m working hard to forge strong relationships with my kids, real relationships, not the top down you-must-obey-and-like-me-because-my-DNA-spawned-you-and-I-expect-undying-loyalty-with-no-effort type relationship, but rather the kind with true connection and vulnerability and authenticity. I want to learn about my kids, seek to understand their perspectives, celebrate their uniqueness and opinions, support them in their endeavors, and when I mess up or they mess up, quickly repair and create an environment in which they feel safe and loved, never rejected and punished. I want them to be genuinely curious about me! This takes time. This takes effort. Relationships are messy and hard, but I’m so grateful that I have the real deal with my kids. I dream of being able to have dinners with them when they are adults and asking them how their day went, listening to them debrief about work and hobbies and maybe even their future children and partners. I want to love them as human beings until the end of my life, and once I’m gone, I want our memories to be the fuel that helps them reach for bigger and better in their own lives. I want them to pass the baton to their children and grandchildren, passing on intergenerational growth and thriving instead of the trauma that has plagued so many of my relatives, and also, been such a hindrance in my own life.

On top of it all, my life is full of the dishes and laundry and cooking and all of the other things that never go away, but in fact seem to exponentially multiply. We have busy sports schedules and a zillion obligations that keep us hopping. A lot of the season I am in right now is pure and utter chaos. I think my job is to just make “this” beautiful, as much as I can. I know someday I will deeply miss it all, but it’s hard to remember this when you feel like you’re drowning.

I don’t have all of the answers. I’m still learning. I mess up and have to try again the next day. I’m not sure it is ever going to be anything I’m good at. It’s just a process I’ll keep trying to do a little better at each day.

I started the new year with skin cancer surgery on my face. It ended up being straightforward and the “best” kind of scenario, considering all of the other types of illnesses one can have, but I felt anxiety about being an only parent and what the next bump in my road could be. I went to the lawyer’s and had my trust revised, constantly worried about what would happen to my kids if something happened to me. It’s a lot of pressure being an only parent. To be the last leg standing. I worried about some future version of me, if she lives long enough to be an old lady, with grown kids, alone at home with cats. Dying alone. I worried about more sun exposure. I worried about being five pounds heavier than I was a couple months ago. I worried about the wrinkles I saw in the mirror. I worried about a to-do list I can never finish, the chores I haven’t gotten to, the decisions I feel paralyzed to make because it’s sometimes too much being the only adult in the house, constantly having to make the decisions, constantly having your thoughts ping-pong around with no relief in sight. I re-read my journal entries from the past year, reading about the ups and downs of my days and weeks and months in my own words. Last spring, the long stretches of unhappiness brewing inside of me, constantly having to keep it at bay, keep my head above water, do better, struggling, no choice but to push through. Last one standing.

This year, I notice the subtle ways those peaks and valleys of unhappiness and happiness are not as steep and not as deep, noticing myself getting better at the ways I can control this wayward mind. Make this beautiful, I keep telling myself. You don’t have to solve the world’s problems. You just have to make this beautiful.

I celebrated my birthday yesterday. 42. I expected nothing. The weekend was already jam-packed with kid-related activities and obligations. No time for my silly day of birth. Make this beautiful, I kept reminding myself. Whatever this season. Whatever and wherever I find myself this year. Just make this beautiful. I went for a morning jog. Cleaned the house. Took new headshots. Wrote in my journal. Reviewed my goals. My sister and nephews stopped by, and the boys had big smiles and hugs and flowers in hand. Squeezed in dinner after a basketball game and basketball team party. We went to a bookstore. Took a hot bath. Finished laundry. This is my season right now. I just have to make whatever is mine beautiful. Somehow, that feels like a more manageable goal than perfection. My youngest secretly contacted my sister to buy flowers for him so he would have something to give me. He wrote me letters full of lovely words. My daughter made art for me. The oldest gave me one of his Magic cards that related to something I’ve been writing and a homemade ring that he made. It was all beautiful, and it reminded me that the most meaningful presents we could ever receive in our lives are not the kind we can buy, but are instead the intangible feelings we experience from the fruits of our labor.

Today I came home and had a zillion things to do. It was sprinkling outside. My youngest had his rollerblades on. “Do you think you have time to go on a walk with me?” he asked.

Make this beautiful.

The dishes and homework and cooking and writing and softball practice and chores and more chores and chores for the chores.

Make this beautiful.

I grabbed my umbrella and off we went. He raced up and down a hill six times, each time perfecting how to make it go a little faster, a little more thrilling. I could hear him whooping with joy at the bottom of the hill. We chatted with a neighbor. It started to sprinkle harder, and we raced home while he told me about the boys he played with at recess.

Most of this uphill battle in life is taking a moment to pause and see what is beautiful right in front of our faces. To know when to turn off the rest of the noise. To let go and lean in.

That’s what I will continue to work on in 2024, in my 42nd year, for the rest of my life. Open my eyes a little wider, listen a little deeper, love a little harder, do a little better.

I can at least try to make my corner of the world a little more beautiful.

Originally published at http://houseofteresa.com on February 27, 2024.