Every Thanksgiving my side of the family spends the holiday at my parents’ lake house in Wisconsin. We all live within five miles of each other, and yet each year we drive eight hours round-trip to spend some time together. The house is in a relatively rural area, so we spend the weekend cooking, eating, reading, playing board games, and watching old movies. We even go out and cut down our own Christmas trees. It’s good old-fashioned family fun. Kinda corny, but its tradition and we love it.

Unfortunately this year our kids came down with coughs while we were up north. Everything was fine all day long: other than the occasional cough or drippy nose you wouldn’t know they were sick. On our second night there both kids went down to sleep without incident, but halfway through the night they both woke up screaming.

It’s never fun to have sick children, and it’s far less fun when you’re all in one bedroom, sharing walls with several other families who are trying to sleep. We gave Juliet juice and Dean a bottle. We gave both kids a natural cough medicine. One would quiet down and the other would get louder. Then they would switch roles. We tried lying down; we tried pacing the small bedroom. We tried what seemed like everything and anything for several hours.

Although Dean wouldn’t let me set him down, he finally did allow me to lie in bed with him cradled in my arms. It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but at least I could get a few minutes of sleep here and there. And I’m not quite sure how this happened, but Mike and Juliet ended up lying on the very narrow section of hardwood floor between the bed and the dresser.

We “slept” like this for a couple of hours and then Dean woke up again. This time I was able to nurse him back to sleep pretty quickly and actually lie him down in the portable crib where he stayed asleep!!! I climbed back in bed, and Mike joined me. As the sun crept over the horizon and the sky lightened just outside our window, we held hands. I whispered “There’s no one I’d rather be miserable with then you.” He squeezed my hand and we drifted off to sleep.

That’s marriage, folks. And a happy one at that. Life isn’t some magical fairytale where you ride off into the sunset and… I don’t even know how to finish that sentence… swim in the ocean by day and feast on fine seafood by night day after day after day for the rest of your bliss-filled life? Whatever it is that supposedly happens after that ride into the sunset – it isn’t real life. Real life is messy and sometimes miserable. But your spouse is the person you’ve chosen to endure this journey with. So if you want to be happy then you must continue to choose this person, moment after wretched moment. Of course they’re not all terrible moments. But the truth is that a lot of them are. So you might as well like the person you’re with.

This week I posted a link on the Seeds of Support page to this article, written by a mom whose 18-month old son will likely die within the coming months or years.  It is a sad and touching story, and a harsh reminder that death is an inevitable part of every life.

This is the sadder side of life: the ugly truth that most religions prefer to skip over – they preach living without sin so that you might have a happy afterlife, without saying a word about the fact that you will, indeed, die. New Thought authors and motivational speakers also steer clear of the topic of death. They teach about using affirmations and positive thinking to heal, as though it will somehow help you to avoid death altogether. And while the power of a positive attitude and the advances of scientific medicine have both certainly proven themselves useful in postponing death, the fact remains that death is an unavoidable part of life.

Still, I feel that affirmations and positive language are useful tools that certainly have a well-earned place within spiritual living. When Juliet is feeling less than 100% we try to say that she is “healing” rather than using the word “sick”. Mike and I feel it is a small but important distinction: “sick” is a label, an indefinite state of being, whereas “healing” implies a transient and temporary state of action.

I’ve had my own share of “healing” experiences, starting from my very first breath, when I was born with a dislocated hip. My parents had to learn how to care for a newborn in a full body cast. When the cast was removed I remained in a large metal brace for the first year of my life. In second grade a virus settled into my hip and I spent weeks (months? I honestly can’t remember now) on crutches waiting for the bone to heal and muscle strength to be regained. A few years after that it was discovered that I had scoliosis – a curvature of the spine – and I had to spend those already excruciating pre-teen years wearing a hard plastic back brace. A few more years and we found a fracture in my lower spine – it’s still there today. And some day I will die. I don’t have a terminal illness (not that I’m aware of, at least), and I didn’t have a prophetic dream of my demise. But as far as I know everyone dies eventually, and I have no compelling reason to believe my story will end any differently.

Yet, affirming wholeness is a huge part of my spiritual practice. But wholeness is not perfect health. My affirmation isn’t about trying to avoid the unavoidable. Rather, it’s about accepting the totality that is my life. Just as I strive to accept my short stature, wide hips, and discolored teeth, I also strive to accept that aging, illness, and yes, even death, are parts of my life experience.

Of course, none of that attitude helped much when kids were teasing me in middle school because of my strange posture (yes, I did have that whole zen-spiritual-positive attitude thing in middle school – just not in the middle of being tormented). Nor did it do me much good when I was entering my 48th hour of labor with my firstborn (no, I am not exaggerating). But throughout both of those ordeals, and countless others throughout my life that I’ve conveniently forgotten, I still knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I was whole: that my life was perfect, even in the midst of this seemingly imperfect situation. Because life is perfectly imperfect. I am perfectly imperfect.

I am whole. Even when it feels like there are holes in me. Because I AM more than I am. If I can remember this one simple concept and model it for my children, then I’ll have done my job as a mother.