Stephanie Macera

I hope that you have had a wonderful summer… despite the outrageous heat that seems to make it hard to breathe!

This post started to be entered just after returning from our family vacation to Table Rock Lake over July 4th.  I was recapping a wonderful trip, some goodies I bought and was just about to publish the post with a photo slideshow, when – ? A troubling phone call home from my daughter.

And the world stopped spinning for me personally.  Everyone else whirled around in the normal earth orbit, except, perhaps my mother.  Her world stopped when mine did.  My daughter was ill, in pain and troubled – and so it seemed I became equally ill and then passed it to my mother.  Isn’t that the way of it?

A dear friend has said to me over the years that you are only as happy as your most unhappy child.  I had a child that I could not find enough adjectives to describe her level of unhappiness.

Day by day, each of us: my daughter, myself and my mother have done a little work, a little discovery, a little growing, a little improving and the world has begun to spin for us again.

And when I came here to try to pick up where I left off and rejoin the living, I found my notes about our trip.  My description of it just after coming home – and it was like finding a part of myself that I thought I had lost.  The carefree-enjoy-life part of a person that sometimes just gets so deeply buried under worry and pain and grief of not being able to help the ones you love.

So here is part of that joy, the part that goes with the pictures:

We had so much fun on our trip!

• It was all girls in Eureka Springs and everyone found something that they wanted and we each followed each other from shop to shop until the money was gone and the goodies were found.
• My belly hurt from giggling in the car with my sister and my mom over a silly joke I told.
• I got to sleep til noon, spent an afternoon scrapbooking and came home with a completed project.
• I took my son on his first flea market adventure, saw him excited to find a gumball machine and eat fried bologna sandwhiches and homemade chocolate pie with the best crust ever in a darling market – and he never complained.

Tell someone today that they are important to you, tell them something they have done that has made your life a little better or given you joy.  They may need to hear it, and in saying it – seeing the light in their eyes – you will find joy for yourself.