The Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done

I think it has been said that it is always darkest before the break of a new day. I recall from cycling that it is always coldest right before the sun comes up. I wouldn’t write this at all if I didn’t feel in my bones that the worst was behind us and that we were slowly crawling back into the light.

Getting through the last year has been the hardest thing I have ever done.

I am used to things coming easily to me. But keeping our ship true to course, navigating the splintered deals and fractured spirits took everything out of me. The year was filled with so many wondrous memories, but those pinpoints of brilliancy were surrounded—in my mind—by the weight of worry. I ardently hope one day to recall 2009 happily, to only remember Sam’s 1st words, his 1st steps, Elise’s emergence into her professional own, Peter’s emergence into the world and I hope to one day forget the thoughts that came rushing in the middle of the night when Elise was breathing and the night was quiet and yet sleep refused to come.

I would go to sleep every night exhausted. I would want to go to sleep at eight at seven, just to get the day behind me in the hopes that the next one might be better. At one point I would have felt myself immune to the miseries that haunted CNN and Fox News but now, somehow, inexplicably, I find myself living the headline. I don’t know how I found myself there…one bad decision after bad decision. Foolishly, I rode the ship until it completely sunk.

I am getting out. I don’t exactly know what will happen. That’s the best part. But I do know that whatever we decide will be the right decision, regardless.

I’m getting out. It feels too late, but it still feels earlier than some. I know we are better off than some. I know, in spirit, in health and in happiness, better off than most. That’s all that should matter.

I don’t go to the office anymore. Elise’s asks me every evening if I am going into my office tomorrow. It’s become a running joke. I get more done in a day, cell phone in hand, walking the neighborhood with Sam or playing soccer at the playground than I do stuck behind my desk. I tell Elise I will go back to my office when there is reason to, when business has been restored to a level sufficient enough to siphon off the black cloud of negativity surrounding it. For now, I am relishing every moment with Elise, Peter and Sam because perhaps soon, I will have to be in an office and behind a desk or somewhere that prohibits me from reading Curious George at 12:30 to put Sam down for his nap or grab a middle-of-the-day coffee with my wife and boys.

I took statistics at the math sciences department at one of the eastern seaboard’s most prestigious universities. I swam from Alcatraz. I ran a marathon. I won the heart of the woman of my dreams. And smiling through 2009 was still the hardest thing I have ever done. I don’t know if I was entirely successful. I hope never to forget how hard it was…and I hope never to think about it again.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, faint as it may be. Things are brighter. Days are better. Dances and skits and songs come more easily, more spontaneously. The other day Sam woke up and asked to watch “Little Einstein’s” on TV. Traditionally, we only let Sam watch Saturday morning cartoons, and it wasn’t Saturday, so I asked him if he wanted me to act out a skit of Little Einstein’s. He said, “Yessee!”, so I did.

“I CAAANNNNOT BELIEVE IT!”

We have options. We have choices. I color. I get bossy. Elise hasn’t seen that side of me in awhile, where a renewed spirit reaches out and takes hold of what is around it and demands, rather than slinks depressingly to the end of the day.

I don’t want to go to bed. I am sleepy, but not tired. I want to stay up all night to live, to experience every moment, every sleepless night with Peter, every diaper change in the dark (dodging fountains of errant pee), groping blindly for diaper tags that tear off between my fingers. I want to eat strawberry ice cream and watch House Hunters every night, because it will remind me of this time of transition when things went from hopeless to hopeful.