Childhoodtake2!

Every Friday we unite for five minutes to write on one word. Only five minutes, that's all we get, that's all we have. And then, right where we are, no edits or second-thoughts, we publish those words. This week, we write on happy.
Go.

"You only know you've been high when you're feeling low"

It's in there, happiness.
It's there, sitting in you, in all of us,
wanting, needing, desperate to come out.
That joyful, free, light feeling of happy.
Joy, is sitting inside.

But in order to appreciate the sun, you need the rain.
In order to appreciate the warmth, winter has to set it.
In order to appreciate joy and love and all things glorious, you have to know pain and sorrow and sadness.

Your natural joy, your carefree spirit, your love of life and amazing smile,
that's what I fell so madly, deeply, crazy in love with.
Up until I met you, I didn't have the kind of life in which someone smiled through their day.
And I just knew, you were going to be the best part of me.
You were going to bring out the best in me.
Our life, would have struggles, because all lives that live and love do,
but happy, we were going to be happy.

And I was right, happy is what we found.
Our life has had struggles.
We are not strangers to pain, we have seen and felt and been covered in blue.
We have fought, with and for each other.
We have held hands through health concerns and kids and we have been turned upside down.
We have lived through this life, we are not surviving it and with that comes pain and loss and at times a hurt that makes your heart break and your face drop and your eyes spill emotion.
But happy, we are.
And through the tantrums and screams and chaos of kids and family
we are now searching for joy,
that natural joy that beamed out of us, when we first met.
When life was simple and all you had to worry about was simple too and you knew it.
I fell in love with that natural joy and it brought out a sense of hope and belief in me,
And I know that if we find it again, they too will realize that joy is just as important as love.

You see, when I feel, I am all in.
Sad, I am blue and covered in sorrow.
Angry, I am enraged and cannot see straight.
Happy, I am elated, beaming, sunshine and so light and carefree.
When I feel, I am all in.
And they are the same.
That is the childhood they and I carry.
We are full of big emotions in this house, all of us wear our hearts on the outside of our bodies.
All of us feel big and speak loud to have our feeling heard and realized.
When we feel, we are all in.

So now that we have happy and love covered,
now that they know how safe they are to express their emotions,
now that our family is finding it's way back,
let's remember the power and magic of joy and happy.
Let's have them look back and say I had a
#happychildhood.

Stop