Some days leave you thinking that you are the comic relief in a badly written narrative. A narrative which leaves the reader with only one comment, “ The characterizations were good, but the story was weak .” As if the only reason for your existence is to continually do the exact opposite of what you set out to do with the day. You are left dithering around with no plot or resolution. These days are draining. They gradually deplete and devour and exhaust. And they come all too frequently.

Some days are just not good ones. What brings out your inner sunshine when the gloom takes over? Is a topic over at … and the rest is history. At first I wasn’t going to comment. After all, how bad can my days be? How can a stay-at-home mom possibly complain? Surely, the mother who has to work and be a mom has more worries than I do. Surely, they have more bad days than I do. Why would I voice my gloomy day remedies? Surely, I have no real hardships because of my carefree life of bon-bon eating and champagne drinking moments of clarity. Someone always has it worse than I do. Plus, I didn’t really have an answer for the question. What does break me from a self-pity moment, day, or year?

Then I remembered that there were, in fact, years of self-pity. Years of wondering why my body was failing me. Why was I not a parent? Why was my body rejecting what my soul wanted so very badly? I am a woman. It is what women do. They carry children. They start families. That feeling of complete failure was all-consuming. What was my sunshine? What light broke through the clouds and pulled me back? And not just in the parenting  aspect of my life but in all aspects of my life. What helped me not curl up in a corner of my world when the world was throwing things at me either financially, or with my educational goals, or relationship struggles?

 I walked upstairs contemplating the answer and there it was.

Time. Contrast. Change.

Sometimes the only thing to remove the feeling of despair is time. Sometimes life has the answers if we just wait for them. Time changes things. Time makes things that were confusing one moment, fade away into understanding. Sometimes it brings healing. Sometimes it brings more questions. But it always brings change. Something to make you realize how important even small moments can be. Youth and Age. Innocence and Experience. The unknowable mingling with the firmly communicated.

So my answer is all three; Time, Contrast, and Change. The beauty of life will always unfold. And no one ever writes a good story without a few tumbles of the main character. What a boring story it would be if there were no villains and there were never any lessons learned. A life filled with plot holes and the lack of internal logic would be a life never examined. The sunshine will always break through and the happy  suitable ending will always be there if we just give it some time.