Gratitude –
Some days it’s harder to feel it than others;
On the days when the kids are sick again, or your bank account is running low.
I, for one, know I’d like to take my tax bill and drop-kick that thing.
I’ve been struggling this week to feel gratitude in my home, in my day-to-day,
as I’ve stared at the same messes, looked the same old issues directly in the face.
I have battled with my teenagers this week over everything it seems.
They have slammed their doors, and left me standing in the hall alone as if I’ve somehow just traveled in the very worst time machine.
I hear the door slam, and I’m transported, suddenly, back to last Tuesday when I stood in that same place.
I have spent days feeling like I’m on a hamster wheel of service to others.
Pour out, dry to dust, never feel refilled again.
It’s easy to grumble.
I stay up late and google “flights to Switzerland from San Francisco.”
I think of going alone and watch silent videos of people just walking the cobblestone streets.
When my mind makes gratitude hard to muster, though, I have picked one specific memory I could never forget that, without fail, I can trust to get me back on my feet.
My Gratitude Cornerstone, if you will.
In the summer of 2013, the church we were attending at the time welcomed a touring children’s choir from Burundi, Africa: One of the top poorest countries in the world.
The choir was made up of children, many orphaned by AIDS or famine, the poorest of the poor.
Participating in this choir afforded the children a chance to not only see the world, but to gather sponsors for themselves and many other children like them that would provide education, medical care, and clothing not only for them personally, but, if any were surviving, their remaining family members back home.
At the time, the church asked for volunteers to help house them while they were in town.
It would only be a few days, and all they would need was a place with beds for two of them.
I signed us up without even discussing it with my husband.
After four, what were two more?
His eyes were big when I told him that, for a short time, he would be a dad of 6 girls under the age of 16.
We were all excited and nervous the day we went to pick them up.
I straightened my hair and checked my lipstick. I wondered what they would think.
They were introduced to us from a sea of kids in matching T-shirts, all with the same haircut.
Capitaline, who would say with the most beautiful smile I have still ever seen, to call her “Capi,” and Divine would be our two.
They each brought just a small bag and a wide, perfect smile.
I almost didn’t want the drive home to end, I was so enamored with just hearing them talk –
The tone of it….The rhythm…
It felt like hearing God breathe.
I think back to how we thought then that we would be the blessing;
How we would show these two disadvantaged girls so many things.
I know now that we would be the ones most changed.
They would be the teachers, those two girls who smelled like their hair Vasoline.
Our first days with them were filled with many moments of firsts for them.
They discovered a love of the Disney channel, and Nacho cheese Doritos, garden hose spray.
They stood with mouths open, astounded to see a pantry.
But the moment that lives forever deepest in me was the moment we led them on the first night to the room where they would sleep.
It was a modest room at the top of the stairs where they would share a queen-sized bed.
Nothing fancy at all;
Soft blue paint, Target brand flannel sheets.
But when my mom, whose room it was, rolled her closet door open to show them where they could put their dirty laundry,
they both stood and gasped, staring into her very modest closet, that was holding MAYBE only 50 things, and that was the moment that Divine breathed in her dialect that sounded like music whenever she would speak, words that will now forever ring:
“Is all this for just one person?”
She touched shirt sleeves like they were holy.
“ALL of these things?!”
All of those things
which were far fewer than how many hung in my closet that I would decide not to show them, now ashamed, or in any one of my girls’ closets.
That room with the least was an unbelievable bounty to these beautiful girls who had traveled barefoot carrying dying siblings, and then over the sea.
At the end of that first stay, I would gulp down sobs as I stuffed their duffle bags full of as many of the girls’ old dresses as I could fit without breaking the zippers, desperate to give them everything.
No matter how I offered, they would only accept one dress to keep each, and then planned out who of the other girls staying in other houses would look best in each of the other things.
Their songs would echo within our walls for months after they had gone.
I would walk barefoot, myself, on my carpet and it was like I could still feel the rumble of their dancing feet.
It has been nearly 10 years now, and I still feel it sometimes.
I thought I could give them so much, but they were the ones who gave to me.
The image of the backs of their heads staring in awe of something I felt was so meager has never been lost on me.
“Is all this for one person? All of these things?!”
Over the next several years, we would end up taking Capi and Divine into our home multiple times on repeat as their tours came back to the U.S.
We followed news of them and their location. Our Honorary Greens.
They grew so much between times we’d see them.
They’d ruffle Paige’s head and smile.
“Our old fat baby” they’d tease,
and this week as I stood at my sink over those same dishes and muttered my same “What about me”s,
I prayed for focus on what really mattered;
A reminder,
a softening of what I felt hardening,
and then there was that image of the back of two heads speaking to me,
reminding me that there are so many others who would look at all of my “Nothing much” and, instead, see a bounty.
May I look at my whole life, even the hum-drum, same old, supposedly boring things
and ask myself,
“Is all this for just one person?”
As I truly take it in, may my eyes also shine like jewels on my face,
because if I can step outside of the frustrations, and the handful of bad, stand-alone days,
I can surely see this life as it is:
A string of tiny miracles, intricate beauty, answered prayers, and too many personal treasures to name.
It’s easy to lose sight of the whole of things as we fixate on what hurt us,
who wronged us that one time, or on a host of other disappointing things;
But I know for sure the type of person that I want to be:
I want to stand at my life’s closet, in awe, and gasping,
“Is all this for ME?!”
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
