There was an evening near the end of the summer when I was tucking my youngest two children into bed and they both fell asleep with their sweaty little heads on my body. We had just read stories and there was nothing special about this summer evening, except that the weight of their tired bodies on mine and the sudden peace after another chaotic day struck me as particularly wonderful. I had one of those parenting moments where you feel a euphoric bliss for how extraordinary it is to raise humans. I could smell summer in their hair–that sweet smelling blend of sunshine, salt from the ocean, and my own children’s pheromones all mixed together. Sometimes I tease my middle child that if I put my nose in his neck just right I can still catch a tiny whiff of the smell of heaven on his neck. He laughs and squeals to get away from me while I hold my face into his body and breathe him in dramatically. It’s mostly a joke of course, but there are moments, like this summer evening, where just briefly, I catch a little waft of heaven.
It was such a beautiful moment.
And then later that same night my youngest woke up restless and demanding at 3:00am. She refused to go back to sleep and instead insisted on a snack, a story, and her favorite TV show. So, the day had started for me in the pitch-black dead of night and the bliss from the bedtime tuck-in crashed into a sincere feeling of dread. Knowing I would have to function throughout my upcoming day on so little sleep felt like a daunting and impossible task. The awfulness of trying to read stories on the couch in the dead of night next to my wide-awake child was a stark contrast to the evening before. The words I was trying to read literally felt heavy in my mouth while my tongue tried to form the letter sounds my eyes were straining to read on the page.
It was such a not-so-beautiful moment.
This experience of intense extremes, from the blissful to the torturous, is similar to how it’s been for me sharing my book with the world. It feels exciting in some moments to share the work I’m passionate about with all of you. And then in other moments, it feels awkward and uncomfortable and way, way, way outside my comfort zone. Writing Crummy Conversations came naturally for me, not that every section was easy to write, but the writing part was like the blissful bedtime tuck-in. Putting the book out into the world, however, with all the clunky tasks related to selling and launching, feels similar to the 3am wake up. This ‘after the writing’ part feels hard.
And isn’t that just real life?
I wish my children would all sleep through the night peacefully never calling out for me in the deep dark dead of night again, but that’s not going to happen. I also wish I could share Crummy Conversations with you without putting myself out there, you know, publicly. Buuuuuut, that also does not appear to be how this goes. It seems to me that experiencing both the highs and the lows, sometimes simultaneously, is what any venture worth pursuing in life is made of.
So, I guess the task at hand is to just keep moving forward while having moments of both bliss and dread, easy and hard, knowing that experiencing both is just how this cookie we call life, crumbles.
Here’s to making tough conversations sweet,
Michelle