I refuse to reiterate the Thanksgiving lie of pilgrims and Indians (sic) eating a meal together celebrating their mutual joy in each other and their joint endeavors. BUT I do believe that taking time to celebrate family, friends, and anything else for which we are grateful has meaning, and taking the time to reflect upon and then express gratitude is very important. The last year has probably been the hardest year of my life. And as a result, I could not have more to be grateful for, or more thanks to give.
I am so grateful for my amazing partner. He has worked so hard to overcome massive familial and social masculinity training to make himself emotionally present and available to me and our children. He does an insanely hard job (staying at home raising our young children, and supporting a spouse with a high intensity job that includes a significant amount of late nights and travel) that I would not survive, and he keeps getting better at it. This week he made a massive quantity of special bread I can eat so that I can dry it out and make it into stuffing because stuffing is my favorite!
I am so grateful for my beyond anything supportive friends. As a child, teenager, and young woman, I do not believe I understood that friends could BE this amazing. I wish every person in the world a ride or die posse like mine, but you cannot have mine I because I cannot live without them.
I am so grateful for a family, both biological and chosen, that I can text or call 24 hours a day, with any stupid question or fear or rant, and they are THERE. They give me the little breaks from the intensity of parenting that I need to continue at all. They support me through literally everything and anything, including tonight, a little girl becoming feverish and falling to pieces in the middle of dinner, followed by a baby throwing up all over everywhere about 20 minutes later!
I am grateful for a career that keeps my family financially secure and which matches my intellectual strengths. I am so lucky to have colleagues that support and encourage me, and that my personal style of “head down, work hard, be excellent” can be recognized, even if I do things like wear cat ear earmuffs on the way to argue my biggest case.
And, most personally and immediately, I am so grateful to have all the decisions essentially done for the kids, all appeals completed, and to have signed the first set of adoption papers TODAY!
We are so lucky to have these two amazing children, who will absolutely be ours (in about 5 months! Governmental speed!!). I am grateful for every smile, every hug, every song, every snuggle. (I’m a little less thankful they are both feverish and coughing, poor babes.)
I am so grateful for how hard X3 is working, her treatment program, and the amazing incredible progress she has made in 6 months.
Make no mistake, October was a shit-show of regression and difficulty and maybe some day I’ll write about it more. But the last two weeks have been nearly magical (yes, I know that bodes ill for the inevitable tragic backsliding!). But there have been more moments of actual pleasure than difficulties. She has learned so much about expressing needs, and emotions, and kind of amazing self-knowledge for a tiny little girl. Last Saturday, she got up and asked to wear her dragon halloween costume (which she wasn’t all that stoked on at actual Halloween, in the middle of emotional chaos). And she did, all day, including to the grocery store. And I looked at my partner and said, “truly, all I’ve ever wanted in a kid was a desire to wear a dragon costume everywhere.” And now I have one (and another one who cannot yet fight me when I also dress her up all the time!)
I am sure that I am doing plenty wrong, and I am certain that there are needs and hopes I am not meeting. But she sings all the time, and six months ago she was barely audible. So we are full of hope with our gratefulness (and terror and exhaustion and excitement and and and).
Thank you to everyone who supports me – and if you read this, you are one of them – in the life I have chosen, which is perhaps not always the life that is the easiest or straightest path for me. And may you all have the good fortune to have as much to be grateful for as I do.