Kate Didd

(Day 44)

There’s something suspiciously cinematic about waking up on the wrong side of the bed.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Wrong side. Different angle of sunlight. Different gravity, apparently. My partner and I switched places the night before, and I woke up disoriented in that soft, romcom kind of way, like the universe hit “shuffle” and said, let’s see who she is from over here.

And listen… something shifted.

Not dramatically. No thunderclap. No orchestral swell. Just this quiet, almost flirtatious whisper of oh… there you are.

Because somewhere along the way between the chaos, the healing, the relentless choosing of myself, I fell back in love with me.

And not the polished, “I’ve got it all together” version.

No, no.

The messy, soft, slightly unhinged, deeply devoted, making-her-bed-like-it’s-a-sacred-ritual version.

For a long time, I burned hot.

Volcanic hot.

The kind of heat that doesn’t just warm you, it consumes you. Anger, survival, grit, determination… all bubbling under the surface like I was one deep breath away from eruption at any given moment.

And then one day… I didn’t erupt.

I just… stopped.

Cooled.

Collapsed inward.

And for a while, I thought that made me empty.

But here’s the thing about volcanoes, when they stop destroying, they start becoming.

Take Crater Lake National Park. Thousands of years ago, it was a violent eruption, Mount Mazama blowing its top in a catastrophic display of nature’s fury. According to the stories of the Klamath Tribes, it wasn’t just geology, it was a battle between sky and underworld, a clash of forces bigger than comprehension.

And when it was over?

It left a crater.

A hollow.

A quiet, aching absence.

But over time, slow, patient, almost imperceptible time, that emptiness filled with water. Rain, snow, silence. Until what once was destruction became one of the most breathtakingly still, impossibly blue lakes in the world.

That’s the part they don’t romanticize enough:

The becoming.

Because here I am.

Three months into choosing myself like it’s not optional but necessary.

Three months of showing my children what it looks like to not abandon yourself.

Three months of doing the small things… the almost laughably small things.

Making the bed. Drinking the water. Taking the breath before reacting. Choosing softness when I used to choose fire.

And now?

I don’t know what I’m mad at anymore.

Isn’t that wild?

I keep reaching for the anger out of habit, like checking my phone when there’s no notification and there’s just… nothing there.

Just this gentle, unfamiliar softness.

Like water settling.

Like peace that doesn’t need to announce itself.

Motherhood, it turns out, is less about controlling tiny humans and more about becoming someone worth imitating.

And my kids? Oh, they’re perfectly imperfect. Spiraling through their own little emotional galaxies like it’s their full-time job. But I see it differently now.

It’s not chaos.

It’s choreography.

And I’ve learned the steps.

Not perfectly, please, I still trip over my own emotional shoelaces but faster. Softer. With a little more grace and a lot less panic.

Because normal isn’t broken.

Normal is just… messy.

And if we’re being honest, as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so beautifully puts it: “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”

Which is to say, none of this is supposed to make perfect sense.

And that’s kind of the point.

So this morning, on the wrong side of the bed, I made my coffee.

I made my bed.

I moved through my little rituals like nothing had changed… even though everything had.

Because the variable wasn’t the side of the bed.

It was me.

And for the first time in a long time, I’m not watching my life unravel in slow, painful threads.

I’m playing with it.

Gently.

Curiously.

Like a woman who finally understands that control doesn’t look like gripping tighter, it looks like choosing, over and over again, the smallest actions that ripple outward.

A made bed.

A deep breath.

A softened response.

Butterfly wings, baby.

And who knows?

Maybe today, that tiny, ordinary choice becomes a tsunami of something beautiful.

Or maybe it just becomes another drop in the lake I’m becoming.

Either way…

I like it here.