Gratitude Found.

I’m a thankful person.  Really. I am.  It’s just that the difficult business of life often gets in the way of me remembering that.  Or showing it.  Or saying it.

It’s just that my blessed life gets bogged down by criminals, and laundry, and dishes, and the little people in my house who sometimes act like criminals (who keeps stealing my good kitchen scissors??) then make me do their laundry and their dishes.  My lucky existence is interrupted by the most mundane of tasks, the most boring of chores, the repetitive nature of raising children up to be respectable adults (and trying to maintain that whole ‘career’ thing on the side).  Wash, feed, clothe, clean, homework, repeat.  It’s exhausting.  And I’m supposed to add. . .rewarding.  This is the part where I’m supposed to say how it’s all worth it.  Every last little snotty nose, disgusting diaper, and sleepless night pays off ten-fold at the end of the day.  And I’m so grateful for it all.  But truth is, most days I’m not.  Most days I’m too tired to look at my cluttered house, my demanding children and my stacks of work files as life’s greatest blessings.  I’m ashamed to admit they are all too often just tasks to check off my list. 

But then, something will remind me to snap out of it.  Like a friend’s terminal illness, my own stint in a wheelchair, or most recently, it was this. . . 

That’s mom and my mother in law, Edna, three years ago at Thanksgiving.  This photos hangs in my kitchen.  And this year as I flitted about with my hand in the business end of a turkey, and my head spinning with a list of things to do, make, purchase, and decorate as the holiday season lands upon me, I caught a glimpse of it.  I love this picture of them.  I love how happy they seem together, caught in a moment of chatting.  I love how they unknowingly coordinated with color and pose.  I love how they are sitting in my kitchen.  And I love how alive my mother was.  And I’m struck with the void left by her death.  And in that moment, I’m grateful.  I’m grateful for her loss.

Mom’s life lesson #10  There is gratitude in loss.

Most of mom’s life lessons were taught in her grand, loud, laugh-filled, presence.  But this one has come from her absence.  For it is her absence that has made me appreciate all that she was.

Not that I didn’t know how amazing she was when she was here.  I did.  She was a hard one to ignore. It’s just that in living my life without her, I feel grateful that I had such an amazing person to lose.  I am thankful that her presence was so tangible, so real, so large in my life that it cannot possibly be filled.  I am so blessed to have been so loved, so served, so led by my mother’s example, that her absence is continually noticed.

It’s not sadness.  It’s really a measure of my joy.   

The void is proof positive of how lucky I was. . .  I am. . .to have been raised by her. And when I slow down long enough to appreciate the loss, I feel grateful, truly grateful.  And I am reminded that I really do appreciate the rest of it.  Every snotty nose, every long-day at work, and every other little moment that requires my undivided attention.  Because I too want to live large, love big, and lead well so that my children know I’m here.  Really feel it.  It is in my greatest loss that I find gratitude for all that is present. 

I will inevitably get side-tracked again. I will most certainly climb back on my hamster-wheel and let life fly by for a while.  But then I will use her giant metal bowls to make a batch of cookies, or find a note she penned for my girls on the inside cover of their favorite picture book, or hear her words in my own yelling voice. And I will feel her loss.  

 And I will be grateful again.