Then Emerson wanted to jump off, but she was scared. We swam out to the trampoline and bounced around for a while. As a single mom I find myself in this situation a lot - there's some adventure that doesn't appeal to me, but there's no one I can turn to and say, "Your turn, honey. But I am a mother now, and I could see that Emerson was afraid, but curious. Before I was a mother, I wouldn't have gone near something like that. Nor did I want to plunge into the deep, dark ocean to swim out to the trampoline. I didn't want to be bouncing around in front of the whole beach in my less-than-supportive bikini. It looked like it was intended to be fun, but was it something I really wanted to do? Not so much. Pretty cool, huh? I'd never seen that before. In front of our hotel, about fifteen feet off the shore in a calm area of the ocean, there was a floating trampoline. It was the first morning of our trip, and Emerson and I spent it playing in the sand and walking along the beach.
I got it when I was at the beach with my daughter, Emerson Rose. This scar that I have on my left shin might give you an idea of what I'm talking about. It's about weathering the small challenges that we encounter every day. But this isn't a book about surviving worst-case scenarios. Toast is small and simple, and maybe eating a lousy piece of it doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world. It's my wacky, serious, skittish, heartfelt attempt to share my jagged route to happiness with other people like me. You can make a new piece of toast in a couple minutes, but happiness takes work. We should settle for nothing less than being good to ourselves and others. There is a way for us to value ourselves without taking away from anyone else. I didn't want to do it anymore, and I don't want other people to do it either. I decided I was too old to continue this way. I had to be done feeling like I didn't deserve good things, tasty things. The harder realization was that in order to change, I needed to stop eating the burnt toast.
Did I really want to spend another ten years this way? The easy answer: no. Jules Renard said, "We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it." Admitting that there were things I still needed to figure out made me see this new decade as a chance to reconsider some of my behaviors. And still, I've been eating that metaphoric burnt toast all my life, and I think other people do too. I don't know about you, but my toaster only has one button. I learned to accept whatever was in front of me without complaint because I didn't think I deserved good things. It taught me that in order for me to succeed, someone else had to suffer. This habitual self-sacrifice was well intended, but ultimately it's a mixed message for a child. But what I know for sure is that although she was a loving and devoted wife and mother, she always took care of everyone and everything else before herself. I can't actually remember if she even likes toast or how she eats it. I learned that from my mother - metaphorically if not literally. So what do you do? Are you the kind of person who tries to scrape off the black? Or do you smother it with jam to hide the taste? Do you throw it away, or do you just eat it? If you shrug and eat the toast, is it because you're willing to settle for less? Maybe you don't want to be wasteful, but if you go ahead and eat that blackened square of bread, then what you're really saying - to yourself and to the world - is that the piece of bread is worth more than your own satisfaction. Charred in a matter of seconds - now it's more like a brick than a piece of toast. Still, you know when you're trying to make it and you just can't get it right? It's too light or too soft, then. It probably has the simplest recipe in the world: one ingredient, one instruction.