Looking for the Good
I don’t know if I am a natural optimist or not. What I do know is I am not a born pessimist, and sometimes that’s the same as being an optimist. There have been some pretty stressful things happening in the lives of people I care about recently, and to help make it through, I have found myself looking for the good, even in the midst of the bad and the hard. Because being able to do that has been one of the keys to surviving the really awful.
What does that look like? Well, here are three situations difficult situations my family has been dealing with lately and what the “good” in each of them looks like.
The Bad: My Aunt, my Mom’s youngest sibling, died of complications from alcoholism
The Good: 1- My Mom and her brother were able to travel to visit her right before she died. (She literally died within a couple of hours of their visit ending.) 2- My cousin K is her (estranged) daughter. K got married one week before she died. We’d been on death watch for a few weeks leading up to that. Given K’s difficult relationship with her mother, her feelings on this are complicated. But at least she made it through her wedding without that added emotional baggage.
The Bad: My cousin M found herself and her boys in an unsafe situation in WY
The Good: 1- Her job was able to transfer her to OR (where K, her stepsister, lives). 2- K was able to find her a house with below-market rent and is otherwise there to help support her. 3- I was able to fly into Denver and drive with her to OR. (I did most of the driving, allowing her to focus on her boys and managing the difficult emotions she was coping with.) 4- The young adult son of another friend has come to stay for the summer and provide childcare while she gets settled in.
The Bad: The hood flew off of M’s car while we were driving down the freeway in WY
The Good: 1- We were actually in a town, instead of the middle of nowhere. 2- We were able to recover the hood. 3- A young man stopped and helped us get it in the back of the car. 4- It was a Saturday (not Sunday), so we were able to find an open body shop that could squeeze us in. 5- The body shop could not fix fix the car, so they bolted down the hood and cut out a hole to allow us to access the oil (the car needs a new quart of oil roughly every 600 miles). 6- Because they could not fully fix the problem, the body shop DID NOT CHARGE us. (Shout out to G&G Mechanic Shop in Rock Springs, WY.) 7- The shop had guard dogs, a family of three beautiful and sweet black German Shepherds, one of them being a three-month-old puppy, who would wander in and check on us while we were waiting for the car.
The Bad: Pop Tart made some poor choices in her freshman year of college, so her other family decided not to let her come home or continue their support of her and is limiting contact.
The Good: 1- Her decisions were the kind of poor decisions made by college freshmen the world over. No one was hurt. 2- As livid as I am about this (and I am), I must remember the other parents worked with me throughout Pop Tart’s high school years to make sure she and I maintained a strong relationship, so Pop Tart reached out to me. (To “confess” her indiscretions.) And instead of shaming her, I am able to support her through this. 3- She has friends who gave her a place to stay while she got a job and now saves up for her own apartment.
Life has been stressful in my family for the past month+. But we are moving through it. And looking for the good helps keep us going.
