The Ordinary Stuff Is the Stuff I Almost Lost

I used to think the important parts of life would be obvious when they happened. Birthdays, weddings, vacations, first days of school, Christmas mornings, the things you take pictures of because everyone understands they are supposed to matter. Those things do matter, but lately I have been noticing how little of my actual life happens during them. Most of my life is happening on completely unremarkable Tuesdays when nobody thinks to take a picture.

It is making dinner while one kid keeps coming into the kitchen asking when it will be ready. It is somebody leaving socks in a place where socks have absolutely no reason to be, hearing a story that takes six minutes longer than the information contained in it, and telling somebody for the fourth time to brush his teeth. It is driving somewhere we have driven a hundred times and listening to the kids argue about something neither of them will remember tomorrow. None of this feels particularly important while it is happening.

I spent a long time believing life was supposed to eventually become something else. There would be a point where I got things figured out, things calmed down, the right combination of circumstances finally arrived and then I could enjoy whatever came after that. I don't think I understood that the waiting period was also my life. There wasn't another version scheduled to begin once I finished dealing with this one.

Alcohol made that easier to miss. I don't mean that every moment before sobriety was terrible, because it wasn't, and pretending it was would be dishonest. I was present for plenty of things and loved plenty of people during those years. But drinking gave me a reliable way to leave a perfectly ordinary evening without physically going anywhere.

I could be in the house without really being in the house. I could finish the responsibilities of the day and then disappear into something that made the remaining hours less distinct. One evening blended into another, and eventually entire stretches of time became difficult to separate in my memory. I didn't know I was giving anything up because nothing dramatic was being taken from me.

That's what feels different now. I notice the boring shit.

I notice one of my kids wandering into the room for no particular reason and staying there because apparently wherever Dad is qualifies as a destination. I notice how they still ask me questions they could probably answer themselves because they want me involved in whatever they are thinking about. I notice the sound of them playing somewhere else in the house, and sometimes I realize that one day the house isn't going to sound like that anymore.

They're six and eight. Those ages feel permanent because childhood moves slowly when you're standing inside a single day, but I already know they aren't. I can look at pictures from three years ago and barely recognize the tiny people standing next to me, even though three years doesn't feel like very long at all.

There are things they do right now that are going to stop without anybody announcing that they stopped. There will be a last time one of them asks me to carry him, a last time somebody crawls into our bed, a last ridiculous school paper brought home in a backpack and a last night when both of them are still little enough to believe Dad probably knows the answer. Most of those lasts will happen without me knowing they were lasts.

That used to scare me enough that I wanted to somehow preserve everything. I don't think that's possible, and I'm not sure it would be healthy if it were. Childhood is supposed to move, people are supposed to change, and my job isn't to trap my kids at the ages where I happen to love them right now. I just don't want to sleep through it while it happens.

The same thing is true outside of parenting. There are ordinary mornings with my wife, stupid conversations in the kitchen, projects around the house, plants I walk past every day, coffee I've made so many times I could probably do it unconscious, and people I assume will continue existing exactly where I left them. None of it announces its importance. Most of it looks like background.

I think I spent years waiting for life to provide enough excitement to justify paying attention to it. Now I am starting to understand that a huge portion of being alive is repetitive, inconvenient, funny, irritating and completely unremarkable. You make dinner and clean the kitchen knowing it will be dirty again tomorrow. You mow grass that will grow back, wash clothes that will become dirty again and answer questions from children who somehow generate replacements faster than you can answer them.

I used to think ordinary meant nothing was happening.

Now I think ordinary is what happens when nothing has been taken away yet.

The people are still in the house. The kids are still little. There is food to cook, laundry to complain about, a yard that needs work and another completely normal day arriving tomorrow. None of that is impressive enough to put on a calendar, and most of it will never appear in a photograph.

I came closer than I like to think about to spending a lot more of my life somewhere else while technically standing right in the middle of it. I can't recover every evening I blurred together, and I don't need to spend the rest of my life punishing myself for that either. I can be here for this one.

Today was ordinary.

I'm beginning to understand how lucky that is.