Ordinary Days

When people ask about reconnecting with my foster family, they usually want the big moment — the phone call, the first hug, the part that would work as a movie scene. I understand why. That part is dramatic, and it happened, and I'm glad it did.

But some of what I remember most isn't that. It's a regular afternoon at the beach with them, months later, that wasn't a special occasion at all. Nobody made a toast. Nobody cried. We just got sand in the car and argued a little about where to eat and existed together for a few unremarkable hours, the same way any family does on any Saturday.

I think that afternoon mattered to me as much as the reunion did, maybe more, because it was proof that we could be ordinary together — that we didn't need a dramatic occasion to justify being in the same room. Forty-one years of birthday cards had been building toward something, and I used to assume that something was a big emotional scene. It turned out what it was really building toward was a normal day. A boring one, even, in the best sense of the word.

I think that's true more broadly than just for reunions. A lot of what people are actually hoping for, in families of any kind, isn't the highlight reel — it's the unremarkable Tuesday, repeated enough times that it stops feeling fragile. If you're in the early, tender part of building a relationship with someone, whether that's a reunited family member or a newly placed foster child or anyone else, I'd gently suggest the ordinary days are doing more work than they get credit for.