“…I allow, just for a moment, the past to push hard against the walls of my heart. Being alive, it seems, means learning to bear the weight of the passing of all things. It means finding a way to lightly hold all the places we’ve loved and left anyway, all the moments and days and years that have already been lived and lost to memory, even as we live on in the here and now, knowing full well that this moment, too, is already gone. It means, always, allowing for the hard truth of endings. It means, too, keeping faith in beginnings.”
~from The Gift of an Ordinary Day:A Mother’s Memoir by Katrina Kenison
Katrina Kenison’s Gift of an Ordinary Day
By the time I finished reading this quote, tears were rolling down my face. The journey of parenthood so often pushes us to places we never imagined, and throws us into moments that, if we truly pause and savor, teeter us on the brink of excruciatingly beauty, tenderness and often, just a touch of peril.
For me, reading The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kenison is like simultaneously savoring the taste of a fine chocolate, rolling around the decadent sweetness in my mouth, and wanting to devour it, hand over fist, to fill that need for connection to a writer who shares the universal experiences of motherhood, womanhood, and staying true to our dreams. After I read Mitten Strings For God: Reflections For Mothers In A Hurry about her life raising two very young boys, I instantly recognized a kindred spirit in Katrina Kenison – a spirit that I wished I had known when my children were in their early years. But for right now, as my teens explore their identities and their dreams, and as my husband and I attempt to parent them with the willingness to honor their dreams, The Gift of an Ordinary Day softens my soul and frequently leaves me in tears.
Thank you, Katrina Kenison, for being one step ahead of me on this journey, and for sharing your world with us.
