Five Minute Friday: Ordinary

It's Friday!! 

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o  r  d  i  n  a  r  y

To be ordinary…normal…average.

Usually we want to be special, unique, rare…and so do I, but not in this way.

How many days, weeks, years have I spent praying, begging, pleading to be ordinary?

To do the ordinary things -- so very ordinary that I never took time when younger to think of them, to make the lists I have now.  To live the ordinary life of that all too common mom of 2.4 children, juggling activities and bills. To go to the ordinary doctors and have ordinary friends. Now I love my special circle of friends but, and I think they would all agree, we would have loved to meet under different circumstances, ordinary circumstances -- moms' groups, Sunday school, PTA meetings. And yet, we meet in waiting rooms, fertility groups, adoption groups. And as amazing as this journey has been, this is not the ordinary I had pictured.

I am not ordinary. You are not ordinary. There is not a single one among us who is ordinary. Every life encounters the unexpected, its own Barren Land. Every story has even the smallest shadow of tragic or sorrow. So I know I am not alone in this longing, craving, for the ordinary, this ache to just be another face in the crowd, to have the luxury to take for granted, to enjoy completely the bliss of ignorance.

And I must step back, away from the voices and faces and screens, to see our beautiful ordinary. My journey is my own. It's unexpected. It's sad. It's amazingly joyful. And in the small, simple moments when the good man grabs my hand and dances me across the room to get ice cream, when I with my pillow-pressed face am awakened by the long standing sun, instead of baby cries; when the good man squeezes my hand at just the right moment and we are wishing the same wishes…I remember: this is my story. All angry and sad and mad and joyful and surprising and beautiful. And for me, this is my ordinary. I am thankful.