...my husband stays home to help his sore back recuperate and spends half the day cleaning the house for me so I'll have less to do in preparation for Thanksgiving. He even placed the couch pillows artfully. And cleaned the blades on the ceiling fan. Really!! A wife's dream come true. Surely it made me happy.
I would have been genuinely and ecstatically happy about all of this. If a deer hadn't been standing in the middle of the road on the way home. And hadn't decided to rearrange the hood of my car. It does make it more difficult to show appreciation for the loving gift of unexpected housework.
Still, I'm proud of the fact that no four-letter words were uttered. I'm glad that we sold our 2002 Passat earlier this year and I was driving a 1992 Subaru -- our "Dave Ramsey" car. Oh, and I'm relieved (but not surprised) that my husband was completely understanding and told me out loud that there was nothing I could have done differently. Eventually I was even able to fully appreciate everything he had done around the house.
Here's the thing. We can't control things like deer hitting the car (or vice versa, depending on how you want to phrase it...which depends on how recently you've been in a deer-car accident). Neither can we really control the circumstances that would supposedly "make me happy when...", since they generally involve someone else's actions and free will can be a bummer in that case.
As Sheila Wray Gregoire puts it, if we say we'll be happen "when...", we're really refusing to be happy now. We might even find that when the happy circumstances finally arrive, they've been negated by something else. So if you have a virtual deer in your headlights (or on your hood) right now, I encourage you to look past it and find something in this moment, this precious "present" time, to be happy about.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Head over to Sheila's blog To Love, Honor and Vacuum for more Wifey Wednesday goodness.
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