Heartfelt thanksgiving

I love the 'year-end review' that Thanksgiving affords me, and this year is particularly sweet.
- Today is my 23rd anniversary. In May of this year, we were talking about separation. (Actually we weren't talking a whole lot, as we could barely stomach speaking to each other for almost 2 months.) We had exhausted counseling; we were out of grin-&-bear-it; nothing was changing, and we were holding together solely for the sake of our dd's graduation cruise the first of June -- we were going to make it through that and then spend the summer figuring out how people separate. Something happened on that cruise...our hearts were softened (I assure you it was miraculous). We walked through the soul-ripping place of giving up hope, and found hope on the other side of it. My marriage today is completely different from the marriage it was for 22.5 years...we live every day like 2 people who have been to the edge of the cliff and are clinging to each other other to keep from falling, part desperation and part beauty and completely alive. It is something to be thankful for.
- Grayson is alive and whole. Enough happens to him to make a mother's heart quake, and this year's skateboard accident and interstate accident again reminded me how precious each day with him is. It helps make the car accident (#2, with my car), the drinking incident, the secret party incident, and all instances of teenage ingratitude take on less importance in the big scheme of things.
- My soul has life. My conversion at Easter brought me to a place of rest after years and years of restlessness. Sharing this path with my Bill is icing on the cake. The silent retreat this summer helped me come to grips with God, to apprehend God even if I don't comprehend God. There are one or two things that I finally 'get' after a lifetime of just assenting belief.
- My new home. It is a fresh start, without the burdensome sad memories, mostly marital, that the other house held for us. It's got a ways to go before I feel like it will completely be Home; but that is OK -- there's energy between the two of us to make that happen together.
- Chelly seems to have grown up, to have grown into her skin, and to be thriving at college. With her emotional history, with her diagnosis... this makes me so happy. She's here this weekend, and I just can't get enough of her, warts and all.

Those are the biggies, I suppose.

As for Thanksgiving Day, it offered up its own reasons to be thankful:
- My mom behaved. No judgemental observations, no woe-is-me- my-daughter-is-a-papist interactions, no uncomfortable silences, no how-you-should-raise-your-children comments.
- Mack being thankful that he is really, really ridiculously good looking (think Zoolander). My mom not getting the movie reference/joke and giving him a mini-lecture on pride, which did not derail him at all... he just looked at her and disarmingly winked, "But you think it's true, don't you?"
-going with Bill to Walk the Line, and seeing some parallels with my him to the Man in Black.
- Reading last night with Clark. He is hard to connect with; he withdraws into his own interior world and won't let anyone in. He completely resisted my invitation to read with him, coldly clutching the opposite edge of the bed from me as I started, "Once there were four children named Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy...". Narnia sucked him in.
- conversation with Clark:
ME: One of the things I love about you is that you are a deep thinker. You won't share your deep thoughts with me, but I know they are there. I don't know what they are, but I think you're almost always thinking of them.
HIM: Pretty much everything in the world.
ME: Anytime you feel like it, your daddy and I would love for you to let us in on some of those thoughts.
HIM: You mean like about mirrors?
ME: Yeah, like about mirrors. (Having absolutely no idea what mirrors had to do with anything).
(long, long pause)
HIM: I wonder how they work.
ME: You mean, like, how they take ordinary glass and coat the back of it with reflective stuff?
HIM: No, like ... Do you ever wonder if mirrors are really like windows into a parallel dimension, where everything that happens there is just like what happens here, except it's backwards?