Happy

I took the boys to the beach for the three nights.  We had a fabulous time.  A single-mom friend and her son joined us for two of the nights, which was great because I got some quality one-on-one adult time with her and there was an extra hand with the boys.  Most significantly though, I was and am happy.  Unadulteratedly happy (pun not intended, but actually, it works quite well).  I feel like me again.  I don't know how long this will last, and I don't expect it to stay like this.  I expect steps back in this two step forward 1 and 11/12ths steps back journey that I've been on.  But I can honestly say that Thursday as I was driving the boys to the beach and then Saturday morning when I went for a run along the shoreline, that I felt pure happiness.  Not happiness with a side order of grief.  Not, stop and thing about all you're thankful for and get happy - happiness, but life is good and I feel it enough to run down the street not caring who sees me bouncing along, pumping my arms in the air singing as I go.
I haven't felt like this since before the bomb dropped nearly 14 months ago.  I feel like I got my old self back.  The grief is still there, but rather than holding it at bay, it just wasn't strong enough to even try to come out.  Instead I kept feeling (not thinking, but feeling), how blessed this life is.  How much I love my three boys.  How much I love going on a trip, even if it's just to the beach.  How gorgeous the weather was, how beautiful the scenery was, how… on and on and on.  I like my life.  And maybe, just maybe, it's even better than it was.  Maybe.  That's pushing it.  I don't want to get carried away or I feel like I will spiral into grief again.  But just for those moments, it was.
I am beginning to understand that the secret here is in the word AND.  I can acknowledge that maybe this life will be even better without having to give up how wrong this all is/was.  It's really hard to do that.  I feel like being happier (as opposed to just happy), means that he was right, and that I was wrong about splitting up being the wrong thing to do, that this really is better.  And as soon as I start thinking  about it, I focus on how I don't want to give that notion up.  I don't want to give up being right about that.  Why's that so hard?  But I don't want to digress in this direction.  I just want to put down evidence that I've been happy.
Somehow, something about the above question made me think of a teaching Rabbi Y. gave recently.  He was telling a story about the Baal Shem Tov.  It was a longer story about faith than I'm going to relay here, but the bottom line is that the Baal Shem Tov argued with a critic who was telling him that he couldn't accept something, and the Baal Shem Tov argued back that the man "could believe, he just didn't want to."  Somehow that fits in here.  I can, but I just don't want to.  Is there any value in exploring why I just don't want to?  Not sure.

:) But that's a tangent….
This weekend I was an iridescent grateful butterfly.
And there's a showing for my house on Wednesday, maybe this is the one!  I'm visualizing 2014 coming together with beautiful new beginnings.