Today is Thanksgiving, and I have a confession to make.
I am not always so good at giving thanks. In fact, at times in my life, I’ve been pretty ungrateful. It can be easy to let thanksgiving slip by the wayside when life gets hectic, and my life, like most everyone else’s, is often hectic. I find myself thinking about how tired I am, and the kids are so much work, and the house is a mess, and our schedule is bursting with too many things to do and places to go. I have cookies to bake for the preschool feast, and Christmas just around the corner with all of its shopping and mailing, and the kids are kicking each other, and the cat with her incessant meowing woke the baby from his nap AGAIN.
Get me out of here, I think to myself. I just want a minute, a moment, when life is easy and nobody needs me, and small people aren’t breaking things or making messes for me to clean up. I want to run away from this life, just for a little while, and I’ll come back, I promise I’ll come back. But right now it feels like it’s too much, too filled with needy children and responsibilities and unpleasant tasks that never feel completed.
I am resentful of the breakfast crumbs under the table and the ring in the bathtub. Irritated with the activities and obligations. At the end of my rope with the kids and their nit-picking and whining and mess-making.
And then something happened to somebody I know. I won’t go into it here because it’s Thanksgiving, and nobody wants to talk about tragedy on Thanksgiving. But it happened, this thing, and it shook me to my core.
“What I wouldn’t give,” she said, “for one more day. Just one more day of how it was before.”
How convicted I felt in my lack of gratitude, recalling how just days prior I had thought to myself, “I am so tired! I can’t take one more day of this.”
And here I am, and I get to have another day. I get to. I get to wake up and see my husband and my children, and we get to live in this space-cramped and wonderful home, and I get to clean up all of the messes from all of the meals that we get to eat. I get to pick up the toys that my children get to play with, and the baby is crying again and I get to cuddle him for as long as he’ll let me. I get to stir the flavored creamer into my coffee and I get to use the scented body wash in the shower.
All of these things, I get to have them in my life, and I rarely even acknowledge them. I don’t feel the luxury of the groceries in the back of my minivan when I’m driving them home from the store. I barely notice the soft sheets on my bed or the hot water in my shower.
But all of these blessings–the chatty phone conversations with my mother, the purring cat in a warm ball on my lap, my husband folding laundry with me in front of our favorite TV show–they are here today, and THANK YOU GOD for blessing me in this life, even in the moments I think are exhausting. Thank you for all of it, even though I deserve none of it.
We adjust to the gifts in our lives, even the huge, monumental ones, until we don’t see or feel them anymore, until we feel entitled to them. This Thanksgiving, I want to see and feel the blessings and remember that none of them are deserved or guaranteed or promised to me for tomorrow. I get to live this life today, and if I am lucky, perhaps I will get to live it tomorrow, too.
Happy Thanksgiving.
(Betsy Swenson can be reached at sliindelife@gmail.com.)
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Being thankful all year is no easy task
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