The Gift of an Ordinary Day

I haven't even finished reading The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother's Memoir, but I would still recommend it. Katrina Kenison has touched me deeply with her insights into mothering, motherhood, self-hood, selfishness, change, time, and perspective.

    "It occurs to me that perhaps I don't have to push at life quite so hard after all, that sometimes the best thing we can do is allow our lives simply to take us where we need to go....
    "There are many things that I dreamed of once that I know now I'll never do. So many opportunities I missed, situations I failed to grasp, mistakes I made that will never really be righted. I carry some baggage, old ratty parcels packed with disappointment and regret. I've wasted too much time worrying, backsliding into fear, when I could have loved and lived more boldly. I've skimmed the surface of life when I could have been diving deep.
   "Yet there are also qualities of mind and heart in me that I am grateful for. I recognize, emerging slowly from beneath the layers, the optimism that has always made me me. My faith in other people, my eagerness to trust their motives and extend the benefit of the doubt. The sense of wonder that dawns as fresh in me each day as morning. The idealism that is both my nature and my gift. The creation of a self, it seems, even at this late stage of the game, is more a process than a project, more about opening and allowing than forcing and doing. Perhaps it does not have to be such hard work after all" (86-88).

I recognize in myself so many of the things she has to say. I feel almost depleted after reading a few chapters, as though I've been doing some deep soul searching. It's amazing. I know the book may not affect anyone else in quite this way, but I feel like she is writing about me in some way. She is helping me discover who I really am under all the facades and trappings of the roles I inhabit, willingly or otherwise, every day.

At the beginning of Chapter 5, "Doors," from which the preceding quote is taken, Katrina quotes Joseph Campbell, who says that the "privilege of a lifetime is being who you are." Katrina then comments,

     "...Not a day goes by that I don't still need to remind myself that my life is not just what's handed to me, nor is it my list of obligations, my accomplishments or failures, or what my family is up to, but rather it is what I choose, day in and day out, to make of it all. When I am able simply to be with things as they are, able to accept the day's challenges without judging, reaching, or wishing for something else, I feel as if I am receiving the privilege, coming a step closer to being myself" (62).

The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother's Memoir

Katrina Kenison