If You Didn't Know

Right now, my house is clean and smelling of disinfectant and the dinner that is in the crock pot. The kids are coloring, playing with action figures, and watching movies. I am sitting down, coffee in hand, at the laptop after having paid some bills, ordered some new glasses, and the like. There is music playing, "The Crow" soundtrack that I got at Goodwill. I have a dear friend who unwinds to Rachmaninov. I am not that girl. The dogs are gnawing on bones and rain is pattering on the roof. If you didn't know, you'd say that it looks nice, pleasant, but ordinary. Nothing special. If you didn't know. But see, I do.
I know that the house was a house that I got only by the grace of God and a very dear friend. That for a while I thought was maybe the worst mistake I'd made recently. When I got up this morning it was a disaster. The kind of disaster that comes when you're only home for days at a time for nearly a month. The puppy had spilled some paint. Some potatoes had joined the dark side. Nothing tragic, just slightly gross. I know that the kids have been rocked these past few months. Going off of the road, their dad getting deployed, the divorce. It would be enough to shake anyone. It shook me. And with one who is on the spectrum and one who has some abandonment issues, it could have gone very, very badly. But they are amazing. We are drawing together and they are cruising right along, if hitting a bump every now and again. I know that I just got back from a con in Chattanooga. Not just a con. My first doing this alone. Don't get me wrong, I've been bearing the brunt and flying solo for a while, but it's different somehow when it's official. It's different when, even though this has been my sole source of income for a while, I'm now under a microscope and we are really seeing the rubber hit the road. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?) And it was Chattanooga. Chattanooga, where we stopped for a night on our honeymoon on our way to New Orleans. Where years later I would finish my very first novel. Where a year after that I would sit, cuddling my baby whohad fallen in a firepit in my lap, watching customers not come while there was the very real possibility of my publishing house and thus livelihood would come crashing down and I may not be able to stop it. So many emotions in Chattanooga. It took a courage I didn't know I had to go and do this, to take this first step, there.

These are the things I know. So, when I look at normal, I don't see nothing special. I see something freaking spectacular.