Coffee Stains

The title of this post was going to originally be the title of my blog.  One, the blog is about me and the kids in Jr. High used to call me "Coffee Stain" because of a scar on my right arm due to a coffee burn I recieved when I was eight months old.  Before you go into the "kids can be so cruel" mantra, neither the nickname or the scar ever bothered me. But the second reason I was going to call the blog "Coffee Stains" was because as a perfectionist, I often get sidetracked and discouraged by all the imperfections in my life, much like when those few drips of coffee that you can't get out of the carpet make you cringe every time you look at them.  But after the year I've had, I started thinking that how if you let them those few drops of coffee on the carpet, that are bound to happen, can make you hate that carpet even if the rest of it is pristine. 

So instead this blog is about the small miracles that happen everyday.  The opposite of "coffee stains", these miracles  are such a part of everyday life we forget see them as such.  It's the extra cash that comes in just as the hospital bill does. ( My dental bill was $256 and change, my state tax refund $256.) It's the extra shifts they offer you at work when money is tight.  It's the phone call from a friend just when you need it,  the minimal damage to your car and yourself in what could have been a very bad accident.

So often we ask, "Why me?" when bad things happen.  As if for some reason we should be exempt from them. As if it makes more sense if the person down the street, around the corner, on the other side of the country, falls into the percentile of the statistic of the bad thing.  I am that person.  The statistics say that twenty percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Include situations where the women didn't even know that she was pregnant (chemical pregnancies perhaps) and that statistic increases to almost fifty percent. Recurrent miscarriages only happen to one to two percent of the fertile population of women.  I fall into that fifty percent. I fall into that one percent. But what happens when we fall into the other side of the percentile? Why don't we ever ask "Why me?" when the good things happen? Maybe if we spent more time appreciating the good things instead of FMLing (and after a fourth loss, I have plenty of reason to FML), we would all be a little happier. I've learned in the last year that most of the time the small miracles are there if we decide to recognize them as such. And the coffee stains, well if they don't scrub out, you can always move a piece of furniture to cover them up.