Attitude and Gratitude

Another birthday has come and gone and each birthday seems to bring with it a time of reflection. When I was little, a teen, and in my early twenties, I gravitated to “What am I gonna get?” Following that I leaned towards where I wanted to be by the time I was X amount of years old, until with bewilderment, I wondered how I got where I was at. This particular orbit around the sun I find myself looking back, and taking in the present, making decisions on not where I want to be, but how I want to be.

I have not achieved the rock star status that I once dreamed about in my teens, nor do I live in the hundred acre wood surrounded by horses, chickens, goats and fifty children. In all honesty, thank God for that. I’ve fallen in love, married, and moved to suburbia. I drive a mini-van and run the road countless hours, along with my husband, to our children’s events. I work in a service industry helping people who need held. I write songs, I’ve cut a CD, I’m part of a blog that includes some of the women who are dearest to my heart, and I go to bed each night tired right down to my bones. In the morning, when all I want to do is grunt, it’s my children’s hugs that warm me more than any cup of coffee ever could. Whoda thunk?

I want to recognize that what I need is what I have. Fame and fortune may never come my way, and yet I am rich beyond any measure I could have imagined as a teen. I have more than I could have possibly envisioned, not by way of cars or a house the size of Cincinnati, but in friendship, fidelity, love and family. I still hate doing dishes, but I’m beginning to be smart enough to realize how fortunate I am to have dishes to wash. Nothing came to me even remotely the way I thought it would, and instead of acting like I was behind the curve on becoming a parent, or realizing goals, the thing is to realize that I have what I always needed, no matter when it came to me.

If I spend my time in wondering what could have been had things been different, I will miss what I have now. I’m in my fifties with a teen and a five-year-old, in a house that is strewn with toys and dog hair, and it’s an adventure walking the mine field. In the course of a day I can count at least twenty moods from my teen, enough to make me wonder if multiple personalities are an issue, and I find myself laughing. My husband can make me want to pull out my hair, but he still makes the coffee every single morning before he wakes me up. I have more than I could have imagined. No, it’s not what I imagined I would have, it’s so much more. So when the tires need replacing, the braces need tweaking, the house needs painting and life takes me on its own course, I’ll work on losing the attitude and recognizing I have so much more to be grateful for.

The Springtime of my Discontent

I won a golden head award at work for best headline of the week last year. It was a sports columnist’s column about the Carolina Panthers that made it to the front page: “The losing season of our discontent.” It speaks for itself.

I’m feeling the springtime of my discontent lately, and of course it’s related to Mom’s declining health. She’s in the very last stages of Alzheimer’s. She’s now a complete invalid in a semi-awake and unable to talk state, confined to her hospital bed at home. When I asked for a week off work to help Dad care for her, a friend at work caught me after deadline that night and got me crying. It’s easy to do at 11:30 p.m. She said, “You must be so angry.” Huh. Of all the things I’d been feeling, I hadn’t thought about anger yet. The luxury of anger I can’t afford to feel. Grief must contain the whole gamut of human emotion, but anger is one I didn’t want to entertain for very long. Once she said it, I was there.

No wonder I’m so easily ticked off by my son’s baseball coach who won’t move him up in the lineup, the AIG teacher who said he didn’t make the cut for next year, lousy drivers. I’m on a short fuse and need to throw the dynamite far from me lest we all blow up. I’m mad at friends who mention lunch with their Moms, or Moms who babysit, or old but healthy people who complain, or people who say they’re too busy. I’m mad at the “sandwich generation” columnist at my paper who has a 17 year old and a Mom in a “memory care facility” she occasionally visits. “But you don’t care for your mother. She’s in a home. And your daughter is a teenager. You have no issues,” is what I wrote on the proof. Ugh. Of course I threw that one in the trash. Mad at a 20something who says she’s paid her dues (by working 1 year), so how dare they lay her off last year, when those with 30 years were, and continue to be, laid off too, and I’m working contract hours at half pay. I’m just mad.

It always leads to self-pity, poor me, my pain is worse, with me. I get dismissive and self-righteous. It’s ugly in here. Changing your mother’s soiled diapers is ugly. Holding her hand as she stares right through you, sitting by her side as she’s dying is unbearable.… I don’t have the words for it.

I listen to Mumford & Sons CD in the car and cry along to “You are not alone in this. As brothers we will stand and hold your hand. You are not alone in this.” Mom is not alone. But I feel like I am. Grief is very self-centered. It wants all of me.

Anger, self-pity, selfish dismissiveness of others’ pain and problems—not what I want to learn from adversity. Grace, mercy, love and especially compassion for what every human being must suffer—this I need to embrace. The good stuff, the stuff that makes me a better human being, not a selfish bitch.

The baseball coach volunteers her time. The AIG teacher has a difficult job, and is facing layoffs. The young girl at work has or will suffer her own losses. They all have pain--this we are guaranteed to share as members of the same human family. You can’t measure pain on a scale, or say mine is worse than yours or yours is worse than mine. Pain pales in comparisons. It’s very humbling, and the ultimate leveler.

A happy coincidence came in that I heard a speaker talk about gratitude the other night, which initially made me mad. It’s so easy to count what’s wrong, but to count what’s right—it’s a sure cure for my anger. There is so much to be grateful for. I remain a humble servant, and humbled more by the day. There is so little we can do, but we can hold each other’s hand. We are not alone in this.