When I was a kid, my mom loved Doris Day movies. She loved the silly romances, but she especially loved the happy endings when Doris Day fell in love, got married, had kids, and lived happily ever after. Who could blame my mom for loving those movies? They were an entertaining escape, like a good beach read or binging on reality TV. Yet those movies never sat quite right with me. Maybe because I’m a skeptic and maybe because I looked around, but it didn’t seem as if everyone was living happily ever after. 

People lost jobs, or got divorced, or had serious illnesses, and you know…life. As a kid I labeled those as bad things because they weren’t happily ever after kind of things. It seemed that I believed that anything but that direct and constant line of happiness was the only way to really be happy. Ha! Life has taught me pretty much the exact opposite. What if happily ever after was really all the stuff ever after? What if it’s sadness and anger and grief and loss and happiness and joy and love and all of it? What if happily ever after is freakin’ all of the stuff?

How often do we think that our wedding day, or the new job, or the new baby, or the new relationship is our happily ever after? For those of us who have been married for more than a few hours, we know that marriage is hard work. It’s not always happy. New jobs can start out great and yet we are likely to hit some snags along the way. A new baby?  Sleep deprivation anyone? Near constant stress for like ever? No such thing as happy ever after because we weren’t meant to always be happy! Yep, you heard it here. We are humans with hundreds of emotions, not just one.

Is it even possible to just be happy if you don’t know what the opposite is? Have you ever had the stomach flu? You know where you are laying on your bathroom floor moaning and praying for the end of time? Happy? Nope, but I bet you are so freakin’ happy when that stomach flu is over! Life is kind of like that stomach flu. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes it’s painful and scary and frustrating and ALL OF IT!

So, what if we started embracing a new expectation? A new version of happily ever after? It’s the version where we say life is ALL OF IT.  It’s all the feelings, all the experiences, all the emotions and thoughts and losses and wins. What if we expected life to be all of it and we called all of it our happily ever after? What if we slide into the end of our life and say to ourselves and anyone who will listen, “I lived it all. All of it. The heartache, the joy, the fear, the anger, the love, the loss…all of it! And I wouldn’t have done it any other way.”

Love,

Lisa Kaplin Psy. D. PCC