Giving Thanks

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I'm finally married, honeymooned, and ready to start life as normal again. The wedding was great, the honeymoon was amazing (I've never eaten so much incredible food in my life!!) and I was able to visit with my best friend from high school and her new family while we were in Ontario. She and her husband have a 20 month old son, Cael, who is super cute and really smart. They also have a new addition, Iain, who was a month old on the day that we were visiting. They are such a beautiful family!! I am thankful for friends like Tanya, who even though she must have been exhausted with her newborn and busy toddler, opened her home to us and made us feel so welcome.

I am thankful for my children as well. They were missed while we were away, but I think the break was a great thing for us. I returned home feeling refreshed and ready to be a better parent than what I have been in the last distracting months leading up to the wedding. I've always felt that they are a huge part of who I am, and they help shape my personality. With a week of no parenting responsibilities, I was worried that I was a different person when childless. It seemed that for the first couple of days, I really had nothing to talk about, and actually felt lost and out of place in my own life. I realized that I have slowly been letting my own individuality slip away, and have been letting the role of mother completely take over. I was desperately in need of some rebalancing in that area...it's OK to love your kids so much it hurts, but you also have to take a bit of time to enjoy things completely unrelated to your kids also, and I haven't been doing that. I'm going to work on that one in the coming months.

Perhaps the things I am most thankful for are the gifts of life and love. Life certainly can have its hurdles, and love doesn't always behave like we wish it would. It is up to us to take what we do have, and create the kind of life we want for ourselves. We are the only ones responsible for the kind of life that we choose to live. Sometimes, the decisions that we make aren't always the right ones, but may seem like the right ones at the time.

This weekend, a very close family friend chose to give up on life. She is, at the time of writing this, in a coma and still clinging to life with the help of a ventilator. I don't pretend to understand the despair and overwhelming emotions she must have been feeling when resorting to such measures, nor am I naive enough to think that everything will be OK for her if she makes it through. Those feelings and decisions are hers and belong only to her.

What I do know is that she is loved, and life is waiting for her to find her way back.