The spiritual life counteracts the countless divisions that pervade our daily life…Living the spiritual life means living life as one unified reality.   Henri Nouwen

Vacation is over, and it’s time to get back to the grind of real life in the suburbs. Which, for me over the past few weeks, has meant bearing up under the deadly weight of that most reviled of activities.

I’ve had to choose paint colors.

I realize most people don’t face difficulties like this–the trips to Sherwin Williams, the agonizing over color swatches that turns into agonizing over samples splashed onto the wall. I’ve been brave, but it’s been hard. And The Kid has been no help.

But I think we’re there. Once I decide between Snot and Phlegm for the baby’s nursery, it’s off to the races.

Seriously, after everything we’ve been through the past few months, you would think that choosing paint colors would be a reward, a walk-in-the-park period of luxury. But since there’s not a gift my fallen heart can’t turn into a burden, I’ve spent most of this process cursing everything from Cucumber to Colonial Revival and lamenting why, why, I must be faced with the eternal punishment of so many options.

I will never run out of opportunities to display ingratitude.

But, thankfully, grace will never run out of opportunities to show me its gifts.

There are the days when I forget it all: when I forget that there were three nights in the hospital, seven added pounds of weight, twice-a-day pin-site cleanings, sponge baths, midnight vomiting, bleeding instead of a belly. There are days when I wonder resentfully if I opened up a Waffle House franchise in my kitchen and no one told me, when I curse the backaches that come with pregnancy and picking up toys, when the sun is too bright and my diamond shoes are too tight.

http://youtu.be/aVsPyaLSzJM

Then I’ll look up at the sky, full of impending rain dammit, while I’m on a walk with TK and notice that the slate gray color above me would be a great choice for our entry way. And to think, I’d never considered it before, so enamored am I of all the sapphires and aquas of a cloud-free day. I’ll lift TK up from his changing pad after a grueling diaper-changing session and realize how much lighter he is without the halo, how much closer I can hold him, and I’ll pray that I never stop realizing it. I’ll hear him say “mama” as The Husband leads him up the stairs and know that when this utterance stops being rare, I may not feel this surge of excitement and joy. But now, with this boy of few words on my hands, I do. I get to.

Some moments can be every color of the rainbow if we let them.

My friend emailed me last week with a recap of an experience that allowed her to witness another woman’s path of difficulty, and it left my friend feeling broken on this person’s behalf and over her own ability to miss all the good stuff. And I wrote back that I was turning this home-improvement venture into Sophie-at-the-concentration-camp over a couple of shades of green, so…yeah. I get it. Then I got TK up from his “nap” and within a few minutes was witnessing a meltdown of epic proportions. A few minutes later, I heard myself saying, “No, you may not take the batteries and Worcestershire sauce to the playground.” This is much of what my days are made of now: things I can’t believe I’m saying, moments I never saw coming. And the struggle for so much of life, so much of us, is not recovering from surgery every day as it is recovering from blindness.

We head outside into a cloudless afternoon, and I look up and find that this clear blue is beautiful, but contains shades of gray that I never noticed before. And that neither would be as beautiful, would be itself, without the other. TK babbles from his stroller, and I hear for the first time not a lack of words, but that his voice? It actually sounds like music.