Finding Joy

A few years ago, when I was making a serious attempt to lose weight, I found myself pacing the house as I dealt with the desire to fill my face with food. I prayed, asking why this was such big issue. The answer came swiftly: "Because you feel like the only joy you have in life is eating."

How does one end up there? Start with a pretty dysfunctional family - a mother with some significant mental health concerns, a loveless marriage between mother and father with daily conflict, a sense of never being good enough, a dad who cared but who was worn out by the constant harrasment of his wife. Due to little modelling of social norms, I entered school with little idea how to make and keep friends, and continued on in that vein as this was before the days that teachers tried to influence anymore than test scores and blatant disobedience in their students' lives.

Outwardly, because I'm fairly intelligent, I learned how to put on a show of normalcy and suck in the rest. But happiness was hard to find. No matter where I was, what I was doing and who I was with, it never seemed to be adequate. I had friends, but I'd always think about the friends I didn't have and what a loser I must be that those people weren't my friend. I could be doing something that should be fun but I'd feel cheated because some other girl had a boyfriend and I didn't. Or others had husbands and I didn't. Or others had kids and I didn't. Or more money. Or supportive parents. Or somebody else had a special part and I didn't. Etc., etc. Most of all, I didn't seem to be capable of initiating fun, only waiting for others to make the first move.

I remember the first time I sensed that changing. It was even before trying to lose weight. I was working at a group home and I took the kids to a figure skating event. I remember watching a certain figure skating and thinking how beautiful and wonderful her performance was, but this time not feeling jealous or ripped off that someone else had a special talent and I didn't.

Donald Miller writes that self-help books simplify the answers to problems, that authors look back at the experiences of their lives and pick out a few points that seem salient and write about them. In real life, these solutions were rarely linear or formulaic, just authors force the experiences into a nice neat package. I'm not going to do that. I don't exactly know how things changed. I think there was some deliberate attempts on my part, but also some situations I fell into that influenced me.

In the happened upon category, the most profound experience has been my children. They take joy in so much that I would have ignored. They have taught me to live in the moment, to notice the specialness of the ordinary, to appreciate the smallest pieces of love, progress and beauty. Being their mother has forced me to be initiater, and I have become more comfortable in that role.

Sometimes I must also make decisions to have fun, to find joy. I used to play piano on a daily basis. I could spend hours at it, and I wrote dozens of songs. Around the time Taryn was born, I stopped. The joy was no longer there, and music was starting to become associated with something very ugly, which I won't write about in this blog (you can ask me about it in a private email if you want). I would meet people from my past who would ask me about what I was up to musically because they knew it was so important to me previously. And I would say "Nothing."

We did something a couple of weeks ago to change that. Our family went ot a music store and put some serious moolah into a bunch of books that would be fun. Taryn bought a book of new songs at her level, Rob got a teach-yourself-piano book which he'd been talking about doing for awhile, and I got a book of children's music to sing with the children, a book of Baby Boomer music (Like "I Heard it through the Grapevine", Beatles hits, and the like) and a book of the classics: Pacabel, Beethoven, Mozart and more. I forgot how great it is to play a Bach piece, how much fun it is to sing a song like "Moon River".

Today we went ot the water park at Portage la Prairie. So many smiles - by the kids, by me. I didn't wish that something was different. I did think about all the joy we have in front of us as the kids grow and change and we have different experiences together (like going to Minnesota in August!). I could be in the moment, and hope for more. I could initiate and I could appreciate.

I am finding joy.