China is stronger with use and SO ARE YOU!!

Did you know that good china (those dishes you got when you got married and use to pull out for special holidays before you discovered how pretty the new paper plates are), actually gets stronger when it’s used?  When it’s left sitting in a cabinet, it dries out and gets weaker, making it brittle and easier to chip and break.  When it’s used on a regular basis, it absorbs moisture from the food on it, from being washed and being handled, which keeps it stronger.

There are times when we all feel like we’ve become brittle and will chip easily. When we’ve had a bad day, week, month ….   When our patience is worn out and all we want is to crawl into bed and hibernate for at least the next 6 months.  When the kids are sick and cranky, when the washer isn’t getting the clothes clean (or worse yet, dumping water on the floor), when our boss at work seems to be giving us triple the load of work he’s giving someone else.  When we have a fight with our spouse.

It’s HARD when we have those days, to get our act back together. To stand tall, instead of slouching. To actively work at making things better, not just for us, but for our families and those around us as well.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I had just returned to The States from a year’s remote in Korea. I got stationed at Blytheville Air Force Base, Arkansas, while my husband got selected for flight school which meant that while he would be at several different training bases for a few months each, they were all on the West Coast.  My life revolved around running the base dining facilities (where the average educational level of both the airmen and the civilians who worked for me was 5^th grade), to coming home at night and living in the visiting officer’s quarters (a hotel room) literally right down the hall from the Service’s Staff Offices that my boss worked out of, because I wasn’t eligible for family housing until the baby was born.

The Base Housing office kept me at the top of their list, and offered me family housing, as soon as the baby was born, so after a 4 week maternity leave that I spent with my parents in St Louis, (that’s all the maternity leave military women were allowed back then), my parents helped me move into base housing.  Then my world changed – it now revolved around work and a baby, plus Mike’s dog, who had been with parents until I got housing.

It didn’t take long before I found myself visiting the Base Thrift Shop several times a week.  I didn’t NEED any “STUFF”, what I needed, craved and got from the Base Thrift Shop was a few minutes of adult conversation that fed my lonely soul.    It wasn’t that I didn’t love my job.  I cared about the people who worked for me and I created training programs that resulted in my staff winning the Annual Hennessey Trophy (which is the top honor for an Air Force Dining Facility), but I wasn’t doing anything to “use” myself and was getting brittle as a result.  So I decided to really get out of my comfort zone.  I found a sitter who could drive himself to and from my house (no more risking waking up the baby to take the sitter home)and joined a belly dancing class to get back in shape.

Whatever is causing you to become brittle, take a leap and find a new activity that will help you to grow and become stronger.