Welcome to Take Heart, where our goal is to give you hope, offer insight and encouragement, so you can flourish in your journey as a Special Needs Mom. Each week, Sara, Amy, and Carrie will explore a theme, share an inspiring story, a practical tip, and an encouraging blessing using their combined experience of over 30 years of parenting special needs children. Thank you for joining us today.
Welcome, I’m Amy J. Brown and this month we are talking about gratitude. This is my favorite season with the fall weather, the beautiful leaves, the cooler temperatures, the pumpkin pie. I love this season, and everywhere you go there are reasons to be thankful. If you walk into a Hobby Lobby, you will actually see signs that tell you to be grateful or thankful. We're surrounded by it. I'm here to tell you, though, honestly, I have had a complicated relationship with gratitude, I have had many attempts at keeping a gratitude journal. Here are some examples. I have six kids. I've been a mom for 27 years, so when my kids were little I used to have a gratitude journal, and I decided to keep it only in the month of November. In the month of November we would pass it around the table every night, and the kids would write one or two things they were thankful for. When I look back, I’m so glad I did this because it's kind of fun to see my now grown kids little chunky backward letters when they were little kids and how the things they were grateful for and their handwriting changed over the years. But it started out like this: I'm thankful for Mommy, for our food, for our home, for our dog, for my friends. Then it went into kids’ interests as they got older: Legos, football, all of the Marvel Universe. But quickly it evolved into this, and these are actual things written in our gratitude journal. I'm thankful for french fries and other such sustenance, fellow dorks, nerds, and freedom of speech, pink fluffy unicorns dancing on a rainbow. And my personal favorite, it makes me laugh every time, I'm thankful for the mayor of Munchkin City. One of my kids actually wrote that. The Gratitude Journal, which started out as a good idea, ended up just being away for the kids to “out funny” one another, which is kind of a thing in the Brown family. I also tried to do some of my own personal gratitude journals. I would write down three things that I was thankful for every day.
And then I read Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are. It's a book about her writing down what she was grateful for and how that changed how she looked at life. Now if you know anything about me, I love a challenge. So I thought, “If Ann can do a thousand gifts, I can do more. So I got a journal and tried to channel my inner Ann Voskamp. I was thankful for sun-dappled light on the trees, crisp, bright, crunchy autumn leaves, the sharp piney scent of the woods. You get it. I was trying to be all poetic. And I'm not Ann Voskamp. That didn't stick either. It wasn't that I wasn't grateful for my house, my husband, my kids, and those sun-dappled leaves, but it just seemed kind of shallow. Of course I was grateful for that. It already was just another item to do on my long list of “to do’s”. Also, my life was so overwhelming at times, that I would forget to write things down or even notice. Honestly it's hard to breathe in the fresh piney woods and notice the sun dappling anything when you’re the mom of six kids and a Special Needs Mom. It’s especially hard when you're dealing with behavioral issues and the ups and downs of life, living with a child with reactive attachment disorder and fetal alcohol syndrome. Basically, I was a gratitude failure, and that's okay. It's not wrong to write down what you're thankful for. It's a good practice, and if you're thankful for the mayor of Munchkin City, please write it down.
But I wanted something deeper, something heart changing. I was realizing that gratitude was not just a list of blessings and things in my life that were going well. Gratitude, deep gratitude, the kind that changes your heart, is anything that causes me to unclench my fist and open my heart. That's the kind of gratitude I wanted, but I wasn't sure how to get there. After thinking and praying about it for a while, I realized something about myself. Next to my cute little list of three things I was grateful for in my pretty journal was a bigger list in my heart of things I was not grateful for. I could say, “Oh yes, I'm thankful,” but still be filled with ingratitude. Maybe you understand that. Maybe you look about you and see all the moms whose lives are not dictated by doctor's appointments and treatments. Maybe your child is left out again because of her behavior. Maybe you see everyone drinking their pumpkin lattes and eating apple crisp, and you don't know how you're going to make it through one more minute with this child. That's okay! I get it.
Here are some things I'm learning about gratitude. The trick is, to live life with gratitude and fullness in the midst of what is broken. In order to live a life of deep gratitude, one that causes us to unclench our fists and open our hearts, we first have to recognize the ingratitude in our life. Here some things I've been thinking about. Number one, gratitude is essential to moving forward. It is essential to keep walking this path as a Special Needs Mom, but ingratitude is when we look about us, and we're not satisfied with what we see. I can give you an example in my real life in the last three months. For 25 years our family has been going to a really cute little cabin in northern Michigan. This place is sacred to us. We have so many wonderful memories there. We were planned and cleared to go in the midst of the pandemic to our little cabin in July. I was really excited about this time because I have adult kids who live in three different states and getting us all together is a rare thing. I love being with my adult kids. They're smart and they're obviously funny because well, I read you the “Gratitude Journal”. They're just so fun to be around. As the week came, and it got closer, I couldn't wait. And then covid hit. My daughter was around somebody who they thought tested positive for covid, so she had to be tested. So she was quarantined; she was quarantined in our basement because she'd already traveled from Minnesota to our house. My son and daughter-in-law were waiting for her test to come back. She was waiting for her test to come back, so not everybody was there. I spent the first part of the week just being super mad about it. I was mad. I was disappointed. I kept thinking how I wanted it to be, and I kept running all kinds of “what if” scenarios in my mind. I am sorry to say that it took me till about Wednesday to stop this nonsense. Was I disappointed? Yes. But they were also blessings that I was missing because all I could see was how it wasn't what I wanted it to be. So, to move forward and walk with gratitude we have to recognize our ingratitude.
Gratitude also opens us up to living grace, but we need to ask for that grace. We need to ask God to give us the grace to be grateful. This may not seem like being ungrateful, but when I don't ask God for help, I am being ungrateful because He offers it freely.
Gratitude also helps me notice and appreciate those in my life. When I'm ungrateful, I could knowingly or unknowingly hurt those in my life. I could be critical because I'm not liking what I see. You know the classic example of this all of us mothers have had, which I've had more than once, is when the kids clean the kitchen. They're so excited to show you that they cleaned the kitchen for you, but all you can see is what they didn't do. And in that moment is a moment for you to be grateful. I have to say I've not always been grateful. I’ve said things like, “You forgot to do “da, da, da”, and then I've crushed the heart of somebody I love because I wasn't grateful. This is a hard one to do because we're so busy. We have so many things, as moms, on our plate. It's really hard to be grateful in the place we're in - with Legos and super complicated plots to Marvel movies. I'm going to be honest with you. I've not always done this well, but I've tried my best to listen and be grateful for the stage we’re in. I really never in my entire life want to hear another plot of a Marvel movie, but that kid who told me those plots and who I think is the one that was grateful for the government of Munchkin City doesn't live here anymore. I miss him, and I'm so glad that I listened, on those times when I could have been doing something else.
So how do we move forward? How do we move forward into a life of deeper gratitude? Well first of all, it is going to start with some humility. We have to take some time and prayerfully consider the places where we've been ungrateful. Now, don't beat yourself up over this, please. It’s okay, you're not perfect. I've been ungrateful so many times. I've been ungrateful this morning. Just think about the times you may have been ungrateful and then prayerfully consider how that may need to change. And then the next step, ask God for the grace to start noticing. Because you know what, you get to choose what you're grateful for, what you let into your life. You get to choose what you're grateful for, what you give attention to. Are you tired and weary as a Special Needs Mom? Yes. Are you discouraged? Yes, but give yourself permission to not wait for things to be better to live a life of gratitude. Please remember this: God uses everything to show us Him, so stay present. Allow grace and love to draw you in, to the gifts He has for you today. Ask him for the grace to unclench your fists and open your heart to gratitude.
And one more thing, you mamas that are out there, who are listening, and are so overwhelmed right now and thinking, ‘Yeah that sounds really great, but I can’t add one more thing to my to do list.’ You don't have to do it all. You don't even have to write this down. Just look about where you are right now and look at one thing that you could be grateful for, one thing maybe you haven't seen. Keep walking straight and do your good work. I am so grateful for you, and I want you to know that your work matters and that you matter, and I'm so glad you joined us today.
I want to end with a quote from the queen of gratitude, Ann Voskamp, “Gratitude is at the center of a life of faith. It sounds too simple to be true, but isn't that the sign of all deep truth; so simple we're tempted to dismiss it, and so hard, it is exactly what God uses to change our hard lives.”
Thank you for joining us this week on Take Heart. Our prayer each week is for your heart to be encouraged. We are so grateful that you are walking on this journey with us. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, so you'll never miss a show. You can follow us on Instagram @takeheartspecialmoms. If you have any questions or comments, follow the links in the show notes and please reach out to us, we would love to hear your story. I also wanted to let you know that we now have a website. You can find us at www.takeheartspecialmoms.com, where you can find things out about the show, read show notes. We will also be having an e-mail sign up list, so if you’d like to get a weekly e-mail from us, letting you know what we’re up to, sign up on our website and that is: www.takeheartspecialmoms.com. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next Tuesday.
