In Which I Expound Melodramatically on Esoteric Things and End Up Sounding Vaguely Like the Movie "Pay It Forward"

So...thankfulness. I promised to write about thankfulness.* Or rather, I'm going to write about how I failed at thankfulness. Because as a general rule, I really prefer to focus on my failures.

A while back, I had written a series of posts "in honor of" the Anarchist's fourth birthday. The Anarchist had been a preemie (a very premature preemie, at that), and I had written to commemorate her miraculous birth. It was all very tragic and lovely, I'm sure. You laughed, you cried. I mostly just cried blubbered. I had finished by writing about the effects of the experience on various members of my family, but had failed to properly finish the series and expound on how the Anarchist and I were doing as a result of her somewhat traumatic birth experience. I never finished writing, because at the exact moment I finished writing the last post about the Anarchist, I was done. Done writing. Forever. I had said everything I needed to say. All the neurotic turmoil inside of me...all the crazy churning beneath the shallow/sarcastic surface...all of it just stopped. I had "processed things" and achieved "closure," Oprah-style. Or so I thought/wanted to think.

I didn't need to write about myself or the Anarchist, because everything was fine. (I never told you how her birth affected me, but I think you can guess. I think you can piece together the bits of hypochondriac ranting, angry-for-no-reason tirades, guilt-laced self-loathing, and survivor's guilt and figure out that I was not okay). But now I had let it all out and I was fine. Great. I had my beautiful, living child running around barking like a puppy and trying to strangle the cat with affection, and I was glad. I was relieved. I was happy. It was nice. Just those easy, flat emotions. Glad. It doesn't even sound as much like an emotional state as it does a garbage bag, does it? But I wasn't sad, traumatized, terrorized, desolate, or any of those other painful things I had been before (that I had no right to be before because my child was fine, wasn't she?), and so everything was good and I could just move on. And I did. My kids went to school, my husband changed careers. I got a job. It was awful. I got a new job. It was good. All was well.

But for all that, I was never really thankful. I never experienced any sort of gratitude that my child was alive and well. Gratitude felt wrong. It felt selfish and awful. I would wake up in the night from nightmares in which I experienced the pain of the loss of other mothers whose children hadn't survived, who had suffered alone, who had not received care and support. And I couldn't be thankful. And I remembered a conversation I had in the hospital with Calm Doctor, and he said it must be terrible for me, and I told him that I was so glad to be cared for and safe and that I was traumatized more by the thought of all the people who didn't get to be cared for the way I did. And I remember that my prayer after that was always "God, whatever happens to us, please let something good come from this. Let someone's life be changed. Make beauty from this darkness," instead of the usual," God, whatever you do, just save my baby." Gratitude was never something I could feel without feeling guilt. So I felt "fine" and "glad" instead.

And then a few weeks ago, several things happened that got the significance junkie inside of me all worked up (and if a Literature/Religions major isn't the epitome of a significance junkie, I don't know who is). After attending church at one of our local mega-churches (yeah, we're still going there), I stopped by the bookstore with the Anarchist and the Dictator. The Dictator was sashaying around the store selecting novels while the Anarchist was playing with the toy train in the children's section and making noises akin to those made by a mating chimpanzee. And I heard a very calm "Hi!" I looked up and was startled to see Calm Doctor, the doctor who had delivered the Anarchist, standing in front of me.

Now, I had run into Calm Doctor a couple of times before and had deliberately avoided eye contact, because the mere sight of the man made me tremble and go weak with the flood of memories/emotions that his presence would trigger. This time, though, I managed to look at him, smile and respond. And it turned out, much to my utter shock, that he remembered us. Not names, or anything, but he remembered us. "Is everything going okay?" he asked, calmly, as is his way. Maybe he was inspired to ask by the screeching monkey noises coming from the Anarchist. She was not doing her best impression of a not-brain-damaged person. "Everything's great," I assured him. I'm certain that he didn't believe me. The Anarchist is not known for displaying her actual level of mental functioning. Although, I would have answered that way even if she had  been profoundly brain-damaged because there was air in her lungs and a smile on her face, and that's good enough for me. We chatted briefly. I remembered that, shortly after the Anarchist had been born, he and his family had gone to Kenya as missionaries, and had worked in the hospitals there, delivering the babies of women who would otherwise have not been cared for and safe. And he introduced me to their third child, a little boy adopted from Africa. And there was something beautiful there, in the direction his life had gone. I hadn't caused it or anything (despite what my prayers had been), but my life had been allowed to touch it, to intersect with it for a second or two, and I got to see the beauty in it, and he got to see the light in my Anarchist's eyes when she smiled and said "hello" before resuming her feral animal-like state. Somehow, that connection was beautiful, and it mattered.

Within the same week, a coworker and I had discovered that our paths had crossed years before. He had played a concert at the Bureaucrat's church, and it turned out that we owned not one, but two copies of his CD. Out of my usual insatiable curiosity, I unearthed the CD and listened once, just to see if I remembered it at all. As I listened, I was flooded with the memory of bed rest, sleepless nights and terrified nightmares, and I realized that not only had I listened to this CD before, but I had listened to it more recently, while pregnant with the Anarchist, during one of the single scariest periods of my life. I had been staying at my parents' house between long bouts at the hospital, waiting to see if the Anarchist would reach viability. Night after night, I was overcome by terror and never slept. The only thing that helped was listening to music on a little portable CD player (I am so dating myself!). The only CDs I had were those I had left at my parents' house after getting married (mostly duplicates of the ones the Bureaucrat already owned). And my coworker's CD was one of them. I had listened to it, repeatedly, because it was calm, and simple, and comforting. Beautiful (strange) connection.

And both of these coincidences had happened within the same week. And the thing I thought was over and done with, the thing that was closed and fine and great and good, the thing about which I was glad, was opened up and thrown in my face all over again. And finally, I was thankful. Because here's the thing, whether God or coincidence, all the answers to my prayers for beauty and redemption are there. All our desires to do good things that touch each other's lives are fulfilled. The beauty that we are and that we bring to the world exists, as does the meaning and the connectedness...whether we see it or not. Even if my child had not survived, even if, God forbid, there was no Anarchist in my house to eat the sunscreen, make the poop jokes, and strangle the cat, even then there would have been grace. People that I had met/would meet/would meet again would do/go on doing/continue to do beautiful things and those things would inspire other things and even in our darkest moments we would see them, and maybe forget them, and remember them again and they would change us, change the world. We affect each other. We're light for each other, and most of the time we don't even know it.

And while I'm prone to focus on all of my failures, on all the minute ways every little thing I do could harm someone, I'm forced to entertain the idea that maybe we can encounter beauty in each other, too. That maybe, without even meaning to, some little thing I say or do might actually help someone rather than irritate or bother them (just now and then...I'm a realist). And this is a scary and difficult thought for someone who feels as utterly flawed as I do. But it's possible. These things do happen. And they happen in the most imperceptible and lovely ways. And we're all better for it. And for that, I am thankful.

* Important Warning: There is absolutely NOTHING funny about this post. This post is the rough equivalent of that crappy poetry we all wrote during our dark existentialist phase in middle school (that wasn't just me, right?) that we just knew was earth-shatteringly profound, but when we found it 10 years later it made us want to commit suicide and not just because it was oh-so-profoundly about suicide.