10/18/10 welcome

Hello! I can’t promise this will be well written but I can say it will definitely follow my stream of consciousness. So if you can follow along, great!

My older sister, Barb, younger sister Erika, and I grew up in Redmond, Washington. All roughly three years apart we were usually in different schools. My parents divorced when I was in fourth grade and my sisters and I lived with my mom, Carol and stayed with my dad, Gunnar, every other weekend and had dinner with him once a week. I don’t remember the year exactly but I feel like it was within a few years of the divorce that my mom had had it with the complaining that my sisters and I were doing. People were lame at school, this thing sucked, insert any of our names here was mean to me. I am sure having a 6-, a 9-, and a 12-year-old to raise was hard enough without all of our bickering and complaining. We held family meetings on a regular basis and one day my mom announced that we were to start “thankfulness” journals. We had to come up with at least 3 three things we were thankful for every day. Every day! We complained bitterly. Well, we took out paper and pencil and came up with what we had to. There was one day that Erika had had a particularly bad day. She was bitterly unhappy about many things. What they were, I don’t remember. On this day, we wrote in our “thankfulness” journals and Erika came up with a page full. At the age of 6 or 7, she wisely commented that on this horrible day she found that she had more things to be thankful for than she had had on any other day. I still think about this from time to time and think of her at that young age as a true inspiration. I think about my mom and how she forced us to do these horrible things, like keep thankfulness journals, that really weren’t that bad and have really shaped me as a person.

This past year was a hard one for me. Last September I left my fiancé and tried to figure out how to leave someone I still loved and had been with for 7 years in order to save myself. I was physically sick for almost a month from all of the stress. I have never missed so much work in my life! I spent time trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces and carry on. I’ve made some good choices and some bad ones. I’ve had a tremendous amount of love, help, and support from friends and family. In looking back at the difficult past year filled with loss, and looking forward to a hopeful next year filled with possibilities, I have decided to honor the idea of my mother from way back when and start a thankfulness journal. For the next 365 days, I will write everyday what I am thankful for. Wow, that’s a lot of days. This blog is really for me to remember to be thankful for what I do have. I am hoping that in a way it will inspire others to think about what they are thankful for as well. In this way, this blog is for you too. Life is amazing. Treasure it.

Today I am thankful for my mother’s idea to take a step back from the day-to-day negativity and harshness that can exist and really look at what we have to be thankful for.

kk