GRATITUDE MONTH: DAY 29: “Everyone enjoys being acknowledged and appreciated. Sometimes even the simplest act of gratitude can change someone’s entire day. Take the time to recognize and value the people around you and appreciate those who make a difference in your lives.” ― Roy T. Bennett
I had a friend, back in the day, who sent her mother a dozen long-stemmed roses on each birthday she had. This was NOT the relationship I had with my mother. It has taken some many years of recovery for me to be grateful for my mother’s teachings and part in my life.
But the message was clear to me. When I got a year sober, I sent thank you cards to those folks who had impacted my life and recovery during that year. It included a Public Defender, an IRS agent, and quite a few unsuspecting people who did not know their part, but who all got a card anyway.
This is a consistent practice I have kept up over the last 30 years. In today’s life, I send fewer cards, but send emails instead. This has the dual advantage of saving money on postage, along with killing fewer trees. Both of those are issues for me. I work hard to create nice e-cards to send.
I love receiving thank you cards from sponsees and the few folks who are on my gift list. I have cards I have saved over the years in a scrapbook. Only kept a few, because I move too much and live in such a tiny home that I had to get rid of most of them. But the ones I kept were significant.
Gratitude has no down side. It is all good. It blesses the person giving it and blesses the person receiving it. We get lots of good juju either way. I am more apt to help someone again if they express gratitude for the things done the first time. Trust me, that is not the criteria I use to decide, but it does make a difference in my approach.
I believe we are all more likely to try to help those who receive our help graciously. I have told the story here about Betty the Bitch and helping her with her housework and cooking. She was SO awful to deal with that I had to pray all the way to her house not to tell her to Fuck Off each time I went to help her. It worked, and over the 2 years that I did that particular deed, we began to be friends. I saw how lonely and sad she was. The more people left her alone, the more bitter and angry she became.
It was a downward cycle, so I began to talk to her about gratitude. A little at a time, she began to talk to others about it, and she even wrote a couple of gratitude lists. I sang the Allene anthem while I cleaned her nasty house and fed her nasty dog and made her healthy soups to eat during the coming week and washed her nasty laundry. Because she had some rather ill-working laundry equipment, I began to take her personal laundry home with me to do and return the following week.
Betty the Bitch and I became friends, if you could call it that. I knew she had no one to take care of her, so I became the sole visitor when she was hospitalized, even had to break into her home one time when she fell and could not get to the door. She gifted me with a great gift before she died. I passed it along, but often wish I still had it (a first edition BB!). But it was the nature of the gift that I understood. She had called it her finest possession and treasure. I agreed.
The similarities between Betty the Bitch and my mother are hard to ignore. Bitter, resentful, angry and lonely, living in fear. How could I not understand and approach them both with gratitude when they show me who I could be and once was? So, I embrace them both in the spirit of gratitude and love. They don’t have to earn that, just receive it. I am not the best giver of those things to those women, but I am learning, one day at a time how to be.
Dolphin Hug 