It’s remarkable when you feel more down on your luck than ever before and there is a simple stranger who, with a small thoughtful gesture, can\u00a0make you realize that things are pretty great.<\/p>\n
We (my family) have been through what is usually referred to as the ringer these last few years.\u00a0Typical young-married-couple-with-two-kids stuff \u2014 money, job changes, money, job losses,\u00a0trying to prove to our families that we aren’t crazy for sticking to our passions, money,\u00a0our daughter having half of her lung taken out. Alright, mostly<\/em> typical stuff \u2014 we have<\/strong> had some things that I’m not quite sure we will ever emotionally recover from (my husband and I can’t really talk about our daughter, two weeks old at the time, almost dying in his arms simply because it was so stressful that I am certain we have blocked most of it out).\u00a0 But back to my point:\u00a0by all accounts of the stress of the last two years, we could be really angry and mean people.\u00a0 I think anyone that has struggled can relate \u2014 you tend to start to lose the better qualities of yourself when things get lower than you ever thought possible.\u00a0 And today I was reminded why\u00a0we came out of it happy and with an even more stellar outlook on everything.<\/p>\n I’m going to sound like the cheesiest feel-good motivational speaker in the world but, here goes.\u00a0This man, a mechanic, who could have taken all my money and been\u00a0an opportunist about the fact that I had <\/strong>to have some work done on my car to pass my emissions test to renew my registration.\u00a0Instead, I explained to him the situation and made a note that we really didn’t have the billions of dollars to fix the part and so, he looked at the car and pushed a simple button and said “there ya go \u2014 you should pass your test now”.\u00a0There\u00a0is <\/em>something that needs to be fixed but it would have cost me lots and lots of money that\u00a0knew\u00a0I didn’t have.\u00a0 He could have just told me to go away but, no, he bought me some time.\u00a0He saved me from a week’s worth of being pulled over by every bored cop who notices that I have expired tags.\u00a0A simple thing that made my life easier and gave me a chance to get things taken care of.\u00a0He referred me to a local mechanic who is cheap and respectable and made me promise to go see him\u00a0soon.\u00a0As I drove away I realized (here comes the cheese) that this exact type of thing was why my husband and I aren’t angry and miserable people.\u00a0Because we have been cared about, on a very human level, by others who have been, or still are, there.\u00a0We’ll always look back on those years with great wonder at how we survived \u2014 and then we will have to remind ourselves that we survived because of the strangers who wouldn’t let us fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s remarkable when you feel more down on your luck than ever before and there is a simple stranger who, with a small thoughtful gesture, can\u00a0make you realize that things are pretty great. We…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,59,101,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cars","category-daily-living","category-home-budget","category-mental-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}