“It’s looking rough out here,” the weatherman noted. “And conditions will only deteriorate throughout the day.”

“Amen, brother,” I thought to myself. Most mornings, I hit my alarm clock and wonder what chaos lurks outside my bedroom door. At forty I’m getting to the point where I need to stretch before engaging. It won’t be boring, it may hurt, and I have no idea how it’s going to turn out.

Navigating life is a tremendous challenge, but most of us do our best to act like it isn’t. We don’t want to burden anyone with our troubles, especially in the South. Those among us with the real problems, at least the public ones, draw strange looks and get their hearts blessed.

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From birth my mother hammered polite manners and social graces into my thick skull. I can work a room, glad hand, and box waltz with the best. Over time I developed the palsy that comes with Southern charm. The most painful moments in my life cloaked themselves with a grimace and a bit of minimizing humor.

More often than not, my daily objective has been to keep it all together. I regularly fail at that task.

With much respect to Katy Perry, people are indeed fireworks. A firework’s brilliant color and pattern is only displayed as its material composition reacts to a violent explosion. Fireworks that remain intact are duds; people whose sole focus is keeping life together similarly fail to flourish. The beautiful moments in life come from responding to chaos and challenge instead of avoiding it.

We also don’t see how people react to life’s explosions until they actually occur. I’m not interested in waiting. I want to know how my people will end up. Does my foster son overcome the demons of his past? Will my teenage son find where he belongs? Does my son who excels at everything end up with the friendships he craves? Will my rather large eight-year-old ever feel comfortable in his own skin?

God has a plan for our lives, but he has always kept the details much closer to his vest than I’d prefer.

We can be confident in our response to pressure and still have moments where we imagine running and screaming from our homes into the woods and leaving it all behind. My wife and I share that sentiment regularly. Then we feel guilty for having such thoughts and beat ourselves up as inadequate parents and spouses.

Family and friends ask me how they can help, and my first reaction is to wonder what they’ve seen as evidence of my lack of capacity or capability. Was it the sheetrock patches in my house? Did they see me dozing off at the gym with my laptop open in front of me? Wait, was I supposed to pick up one of the kids and forgot?

More often than not, the truth is stranger than fiction.

Some critter absolutely exploded a mockingbird in my backyard. All that was left was a pile of feathers and a leg. My boys asked me what we should do about it. “We’ll just mow over it,” I responded. I panicked briefly wondering if they would assume that’s the correct response for any murder scene. Then I realized explaining the proper response to an actual murder scene was a bit much in the moment, so I stopped talking. It’s going to be a mess to clean the mower if the neighborhood fox leaves a dead rabbit in the yard.

I also have an inordinate number of sticks in my garage. It’s absolutely absurd. I don’t want to talk about the perfectly reasonable sticks that I’ve collected, but my boys pick them up wherever we go. You’ll never know when you’ll need a good stick, but pretty soon you’ll be able to find all of them at my house.

My oldest biological son dresses like he’s the most New Jersey kid in the South. His fashion preference is Beastie Boys all the way to the over-the-top chains. My wife and I look at each other wondering where it comes from or if someone from Brooks Brothers traumatized him.

I’d like to tell you that it’s all connected, and we’ll look back at all this and see the beautiful story of our lives. My wife and I aspire to fondly remember the dog eating my deceased grandfather’s gold teeth and laugh about that phase where my sons only made fart jokes and giggled everytime anyone said “balls.”

This isn’t Hallmark, people. I can tell you from experience that fart jokes are not a passing phase. Yet most mornings I’m able to smile when I open my bedroom door. I’m not trying to hold it together anymore. What matters is how my family, friends, and I respond to life’s chaotic challenges. We develop character. We grow. I don’t know how it will turn out, but I’m optimistic.

I just can’t forget to stretch.

Smith is a recovering political attorney with four boys, two dogs, and an extremely patient wife. He engages media, business, and policy through the Triptych Foundation and Triptych Media. Please direct outrage or agreement to [email protected] or @DCameronSmith on Twitter.