{"id":1807,"date":"2013-05-19T06:42:09","date_gmt":"2013-05-19T10:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/?p=1807"},"modified":"2013-05-19T06:42:09","modified_gmt":"2013-05-19T10:42:09","slug":"ordinary-days-everywhere-and-the-words-to-the-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/ordinary-days-everywhere-and-the-words-to-the-video\/","title":{"rendered":"Ordinary Days, everywhere (and, finally, the words to the video)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_4292_2\"<\/a>A<\/span> funny thing happened last weekend.\u00a0 I turned on my computer to check email, and there were a dozen letters from Australia, each bearing kind Happy Mother\u2019s Day wishes from down under.\u00a0 There were even more messages for me on Facebook<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 I was puzzled at first, but then the fifth note I read explained what was going on:\u00a0 \u201cYour Gift of an Ordinary Day video<\/strong><\/a> is going viral in Australia,\u201d a mom of two wrote to me.<\/p>\n

Sure enough.\u00a0 I paid a visit to the YouTube link: 200,000 more clicks in just a couple of days — and suddenly my three-year-old video was inching right up toward 2 million views.\u00a0 (When I told this to my friend Ann Patchett, she promptly pointed out that Fifty Shades of Grey<\/em> first went viral in Australia, too, which is probably not relevant, but who can say?\u00a0 I\u2019m pretty certain her email is the only time the titles Fifty Shades of Grey<\/em> and The Gift of an Ordinary Day<\/a><\/strong> have appeared in the same sentence, and that alone gave me pause.)<\/p>\n

\u201cBut where can I find the words to your poem?\u201d my Australian correspondent asked. \u201cWhat I really want is the coffee table version of this video so I can read it again and again.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wrote her back, but I couldn’t give her what she wanted. The fact is, I didn\u2019t envision the video script as a poem, but it isn\u2019t exactly a direct excerpt from my book either. \u00a0To write it, I did take some sentences from The Gift of an Ordinary Day<\/strong><\/a>. But then I thought about my children and and about ordinary days and all the things I worried about and loved and missed, and I added some more sentences in order to create a piece that could stand on its own. \u00a0Then I tried reading the whole thing out loud to a friend.\u00a0 There were two problems.<\/p>\n

Given that I was still smack in the middle of that raw and tender place of having sent one son off to college and knowing his brother would soon be gone, too, I couldn\u2019t get through it without tears.\u00a0 And it took me over seven minutes to read out loud.\u00a0 \u201cI know it\u2019s way too long for a video. No one will watch,\u201d I said to my friend. (The whole point of doing the video was to spread the word about my book<\/i> — and everyone had told me that three minutes was the maximum amount of time anyone would pay attention.) But try as I might, I couldn\u2019t find a line to cut.<\/p>\n

In the end, I just went with it. \u00a0I practiced a few times, so I could read about my \u00a0children growing up without choking up myself, and then we filmed it. \u00a0 To my surprise, people did watch.\u00a0 And they shared with their friends, who shared with their<\/em> friends, which is how a reading I did three years ago in my living room for my book group and my neighbors came to be seen by thousands of moms in Australia last weekend. (Turns out, they were also reading my blog, including my cake recipe<\/strong><\/a> from a few weeks ago, which gave rise to some more questions: \u00a0“What is a stick<\/em> of butter? How many grams is that?” and “I wish I knew what a tube pan was!”)<\/p>\n

Over the last couple of years, I\u2019ve received many requests for the written words to the video<\/a><\/strong>, especially in the springtime, with the end of the school year approaching, graduations looming, and big life transitions right around the corner. For a long time, I held off (I was hoping people would buy the book<\/i>, after all), but since there will never be a coffee table version, I decided the best way to answer \u00a0the demand would be to just print the words here, for anyone to read and use. \u00a0Three years later, and I haven’t changed my mind: \u00a0the gift I still cherish above all else is the gift of a perfectly ordinary day. It seems, from what I hear, that mothers and fathers everywhere feel exactly the same.<\/p>\n

Click here to watch the video.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0The Gift of an Ordinary Day<\/span><\/h3>\n

by Katrina Kenison<\/p>\n

You think the life you have right now is the only life there is, the one that\u2019s going to last forever. And so it\u2019s easy to take it all for granted — the uneventful days that begin with pancakes for breakfast and end with snuggles and made-up stories in the dark.\u00a0 In between, there might be a walk to the creek, a dandelion bouquet, caterpillars in a jar.\u00a0 Countless peanut butter sandwiches, baking soda volcanoes, and impassioned renditions of The Wheels on the Bus.\u00a0 Winter\u2019s lopsided snowmen and summer trips to town for cookie-dough ice cream cones.\u00a0 Cheerios poured into bowls,\u00a0 fingernails clipped, cowlicks pasted down with warm water. Nose kisses and eyelash kisses and pinky swears.<\/p>\n

Of course, I worried.\u00a0 I thought if I didn\u2019t carry my four-year-old back to his own room after a bad dream,\u00a0 he would sleep with us forever.\u00a0 I thought, when one son refused to share his favorite puppet, it meant he\u2019d never play well with others.\u00a0 When my first-born cried as I left him at the nursery school door, I believed he would always have trouble separating.\u00a0 Sometimes, out in the parking lot, I cried too, and wondered why saying good-bye has to be so hard, and if maybe I was the one with the problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the flowers bloom in their own time,\u201d my 85-year old-grandmother said when I confided my fears.\u00a0 Of course, she was right.<\/p>\n

There were disappointments — teams not made, best friends who turned mean for no reason, ear aches and strep throats and poison ivy.\u00a0 A cat that died too soon, fish after fish gone belly up in the tank.\u00a0 But mostly, the world we lived in, the family we\u2019d made, childhood itself, felt solid, certain,\u00a0 enduring.<\/p>\n

What I loved most of all was a boy on my lap, the Johnsons baby shampoo smell of just-washed hair.\u00a0 I loved my sons’ kissable cheeks and round bellies, their unanswerable questions, their innocent faith in Santa Claus and birthday wishes and heaven as a real place.\u00a0 I loved their sudden tears and wild, infectious giggles, even the smell of their morning breath, when they would leap, upon waking, from their own warm beds directly into ours.<\/p>\n

For most of us, the end comes in stages.\u00a0 Baseballs stop flying in the back yard.\u00a0 Board games gather dust on the shelves.\u00a0 Baths give way to showers, long ones, at the oddest times of day.\u00a0 A bedroom door that\u2019s always been open, quietly closes. And then, one day, crossing the street, you reach out to take a hand that\u2019s always been there — and find you\u2019re grasping at air instead, and that your 12-year-old is deliberately walking two steps behind, pretending he doesn\u2019t know who you are.<\/p>\n

It hits you then:\u00a0 you\u2019ve entered a strange new territory, a place known as adolescence.<\/p>\n

Arriving on these foreign shores, you feel the ground shift beneath your feet.\u00a0 The child you\u2019ve loved and held and sacrificed for has been transformed, en route, into a sullen, alien creature hunched over a cereal bowl.\u00a0 And you wonder where you went wrong.<\/p>\n

The thing is, you can\u2019t go back and do one single minute of it over.\u00a0 All you can do is figure out how to get through the rest of the day, or the midnight hour when your mind keeps replaying the last argument you had with your tenth-grader, and wondering: How can I do this better?<\/p>\n

Slowly, you begin to get the lay of this unfamiliar landscape, just as it dawns on you — the life that once seemed like forever has already slipped away.\u00a0 The old routines don\u2019t work anymore.\u00a0 Instead, every day now, it\u2019s like you\u2019re learning to dance all over again, with strangers, spinning faster and faster.\u00a0 Holding on, letting go.<\/p>\n

You do what you can to keep up.\u00a0 You fill the refrigerator, drive, supervise, proofread, and fill the refrigerator again.\u00a0 You negotiate curfews and car privileges, fill the refrigerator, confiscate the keys, set new limits.\u00a0 You celebrate a part in the school play, a three-pointer, a hard-earned A-minus.\u00a0 You fill the refrigerator, and you fill in every bit of white space on your calendar:\u00a0 SAT s and ACTs and SATIIs, playoffs and performances and proms.\u00a0 You ignore a bedroom that looks as if it\u2019s been bombed, write lots of checks, try not to ask so many questions. You fill the refrigerator, count the beer bottles in the door.\u00a0 You willingly give up the last ice cream sandwich in the freezer,\u00a0 buy pizzas when their friends come over, keep the dog quiet on Saturday morning till you hear feet hit the floor upstairs.\u00a0 You learn to text, and to pray.<\/p>\n

There are many nights when you trade sleep for vigilance.\u00a0 You become an expert in reading the rise and fall of a phone conversation muffled behind a door, the look in their eyes as they walk through the room, the meaning of a sigh, the smell of a jacket, the unspoken message behind the innocuous,\u00a0 \u201cHey mom.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cHey,\u201d you say.\u00a0 \u201cHey, hon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before you know it, you\u2019re in the homestretch of high school — and face to face with a truth you should have known all along:\u00a0 this time of parents and children, all living together under one roof, isn\u2019t the whole story after all; it\u2019s just one chapter.\u00a0 Hard as it is to live with teenagers, you can\u2019t quite imagine life without them.<\/p>\n

And yet this time of\u00a0 24\/7, zip-your-jacket-here\u2019s-your-sandwich mothering by which you\u2019ve defined yourself for so long, is coming to an end.<\/p>\n

So, you remind yourself:\u00a0 Learn the art of letting go by practicing it in the present. Instead of regretting what\u2019s over and done with, savor every minute of the\u00a0 life you have right now:\u00a0 A family dinner.\u00a0 You and the kids, all squeezed onto the couch to watch a movie.\u00a0 A cup of tea in the kitchen before bed.\u00a0 Saying goodnight in person.<\/p>\n

If motherhood teaches us anything, it\u2019s that we can\u2019t change our children, we can only change ourselves.<\/p>\n

And so, instead of wishing that the kids could be different somehow, you try to see, every day, what is already good in each of them, and to love that.\u00a0 Because any moment now, you\u2019re going to be hugging a daughter who\u2019s turned into a woman. Or standing on tiptoe, saying good-bye to a son who\u2019s suddenly six-feet tall, and heading off to a college halfway across the country.<\/p>\n

They leave in a blur — packing, chatting, blasting music, tearing the closets apart in a desperate last-minute search for the gray sweatshirt or the Timberland boots.\u00a0 And then, too soon, they really are gone, and the house rings with a new kind of silence.\u00a0 The gallon of whole milk turns sour in the fridge, because no one\u2019s home to drink it.\u00a0 The last ice cream sandwich is all yours.\u00a0\u00a0 Nobody needs the car.<\/p>\n

You look at your husband across the dinner table, which suddenly feels way too big for two, and wonder, How did it all end so fast?<\/em><\/p>\n

The bookshelf in my own living room is full of photo albums, nearly twenty years worth of well-documented birthday cakes and holidays,\u00a0 piano recitals and Little League games.\u00a0 But the memories I find myself sifting through the past to find, the ones that I\u2019d give anything now to relive, are the ones that no one ever thought to photograph, the ones that came and went as softly as a breeze on a summer afternoon.<\/p>\n

It has taken a while, but I certainly do know it now–the most wonderful gift I had, the gift I\u2019ve finally learned to cherish above all else, was the gift of all those perfectly ordinary days.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A funny thing happened last weekend.\u00a0 I turned on my computer to check email, and there were a dozen letters from Australia, each bearing kind Happy Mother\u2019s Day wishes from down under.\u00a0 There were even more messages for me on Facebook.\u00a0 I was puzzled at first, but then the fifth note I read explained what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,48],"tags":[172,422],"class_list":{"0":"post-1807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-parenting","8":"category-the-gift-of-an-ordinary-day","9":"tag-facebook","10":"tag-the-gift-of-an-ordinary-day-2","11":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}