My Gratitude
In January of 2022, I looked at the calendar and circled three dates about which I would decide daily how much to worry.
September 20th: My daughter Georgia would hopefully graduate from the Army’s Basic Officer Leadership Course. The Land Navigation test therein decides most officers’ fates.
November 8th: The Midterms.
November 19th: My daughter Isabelle’s wedding.
It became a compulsion, measuring out the pleas to the universe about each of these concerns. I had marked Thanksgiving Day, 2022 my personal finish line, the day I would know if hope was legitimately tied to the future, the day in which gratitude would be realer than it ever has before, not just strangled words around a table.
And here we are: all three. Georgia is an S-1, a Human Resources Officer in the US. Army. The people of the United States proved they are reasonable and thoughtful. Isabelle and Jay are married..
None were easily achieved: Georgia sweated through Hades-like South Carolina temperatures for four months.
Right on cue, the New York Times started reporting, as they do two weeks before every national election, that the GOP was looking strong. We had to suffer this reporting and more like it.
On the third day of Izzy’s prewedding week, I slipped out the front door of my daughter’s future in-law’s house, where fifty or so guests were feasting, and cried, walking the dark Marin County streets under the stars. I cried feeling meanly sorry for myself that I was in a room filled with strangers celebrating my daughter’s wedding, that I was participating in ceremonies in a language I didn’t understand, that I felt I was losing my daughter. I had battled these peevish, self-involved feelings until I just couldn’t, but then the cool air and darkness slowed the spasming heartache inside me. I returned to the house, and moved among the laughing crowd, who were now all doing Karaoke to both western and Indian music. I sat and watched, and tried very very hard to just be with all of it.
My mother died eleven years ago. She was a complicated woman - a woman who left college pregnant, and then raised three children alone, and never had more than $50 in a savings account, but said she wanted all her grandchildren to be poets. I cursed her a lot - as only a daughter can - but I was always aware of these globs of wisdom that fell from her seemingly out of nowhere. She did not necessarily live her life wisely - from my perspective - so how did she know that worry always weighs the same or that matter never vanishes?
That night as I sat listening to happy off-key singing through a tinny microphone in a room full of brightly dressed people, this came to me from my mother’s glossary of worldly intelligence:
“We will never have peace unless tribes start marrying each other.”
I have never felt gratitude as I do today.
Addendum: I love this photo. To learn why I love this photo, listen to this episode of “We Can Do Hard Things.” It’s entitled “Why are there no pictures of us?”
A stranger looking through most family albums will think the mothers never dressed up for Halloween, never opened a Christmas present, and never attended their children’s birthdays. Of course we are not in the photos because we are taking the pictures. Amanda, Glennon’s sister, now stops families in public and asks if they want their picture taken, just to make sure the mother is included in a happy family shot.
I know of one other photo of me - a photo that has fallen out of its frame and traveled so lovingly around the house it is tattered and cracked (Thus the black speck on my mouth.)
- that shows the way I feel about my child. The lead photo does, too. Thank you to that bridesmaid who saw that second for what it was, and took a picture.
Glennon Doyle’s podcast with her wife Abby and sister Amanda goes deep into this issue, which is of course really about much more than photos. Listen.
