Thank you, Pollyanna!

I'm not alone, I'm sure, when I say that I've been through my fair share of crap in my lifetime.  My "crap" is that I've learned, first hand, that some people are poisonous and need to be steered clear of in order to maintain some sense of sanity.  We all have a relative who is the family's proverbial black sheep.  Most people are fortunate enough to have that person be an uncle or a cousin.  Mine, embarrassingly, is my own father.  

He, not by his own choice, moved out of our house when I was nineteen.  I'm not going to go into detail about what led up to him being told that enough was enough.  Being a cry baby and re-hashing the nonsense isn't important.  I do want to share a bit about how I chose to face the situation that, somehow, made things not seem quite as awful as I'm sure they were.

I played a little game that Pollyanna called "The Glad Game" (if you've never seen this classic Disney film, SHAME ON YOU...stop reading, rent it and watch it right away!!)  The point of the game is to take something unpleasant and see it in a different light so that the focus changes to the good points of the situation rather than the bad.  I played this game faithfully after he left and realized that a lot of good had come from this painful change in our lives.  For example, GOULASH...a simple meal that my mom, brother and I could only enjoy when he was away because it wasn't his preferred meat and potatoes type of meal was now fair game for any night of our choosing.  There were many, many good things that I found that may not seem like a big deal to many, but, to us, they were the silver lining.

My point here is this: Life will hand us all garbage.  Sometimes we get lucky and it's nothing more than a gum wrapper that we can quickly scoop up, toss in the trash and be done with it.  Unfortunately, once in awhile, an entire dumpster (or 2 or 10) gets emptied onto our front steps.  It's a lot to sort through, our hands will get messy and we will probably be exhausted by the clean up for awhile, but it will seem a bit less overwhelming if we search for the silver lining of it all.  

Don't get me wrong, I've been hurt and angry.  I've cried (and still do from time to time) and yelled, but I've also laughed and smiled and found a deep sense of satisfaction knowing that life is good in spite of him and all he's put us through.   

Anyway, at the risk of sounding nauseatingly cliche, sometimes life hands you lemons...