Charmed Life

Angela and Charlie's comments on yesterday's post had me thinking about what it means to have a charmed life. Truth be told, I often feel that I do. It's not that everything has always gone exactly the way I wished nor is my history without its fraught periods. But fundamentally, I have no complaints. It may owe to nothing more than being basically a glass-half-full-kind of girl who really does stop to smell the roses. (Because really, why wouldn't you?)

But I can be a fishwife, The Spouse passive-aggressive and The Child, in the way of all tween-agers, maddening. We all, despite sharing a roof, can be selfish beyond belief. I don't intend to sanitize everything for your protection, I just decided, in the beginning, that my blog was no place to come and complain relentlessly about my family or bemoan the ways in which we disappoint each other. The exception, of course, being if I can do so in a mildly amusing way, thereby making a universal comment on the human condition.

That decision, however, renders this blog a place that might tend toward painting a picture of general rosiness and charm. "Our house is a very, very fine house" and all that. And our house is a fine house (not grand, but fine) and most days and most minutes of most days, I'm delighted to be in this house with these people. We laugh quite a lot, we eat well and are blessed with work we enjoy and friends we love. I'm just saying that we aren't without our dramas. Trust me. I just prefer to leave out most of the sturm and drang because, frankly, who needs it?

As it happens, most of yesterday I had a vague sense of thunder in the back of my head. People weren't being particularly patient with each other, there was an air of stress peppered with hormones. At the afternoon birthday party we were none of us in the same room at the same time for more than 10 seconds. Which was more than fine. It wasn't hostility. We just needed a break.

We were back to rights by the time we returned home and our dinner guests arrived. And then, in the midst of the evening and apropos of nothing, there was a moment: Stina was playing a Mozart something on the piano, the aroma of kebabs was wafting through the open door, children were playing happily, the fading light was just so in the room and I thought, "Yes, this is a charmed life". So Angela, I'll grant you the charm. But let's not confuse charm with perfection. Perfection would be deadly dull anyway.