The Gratitude That Actually Holds Up

May is my birthday month, and I want to talk about gratitude. But not the kind you’re thinking of. Not the gratitude journal you bought in January and abandoned by February. Not the Instagram tile in cursive font reminding you to “choose joy.” Not the well-meaning advice from someone who’s rarely had a hard week telling you to “just focus on the positive.” That gratitude is thin. It cracks the second life gets heavy. And we all know it.

I want to talk about the real kind. The kind that holds up when you’re tired, when you’re grieving, when the news is bleak, when your body is failing you, when the people you love are struggling and you can’t fix it. The kind you have to come back to, again and again, because life will absolutely knock you off of it.

Let me tell you what I’m grateful for this May.

My Granddaughter Turns Two

The day before my birthday, my granddaughter turns two. Two. A whole little person who didn’t exist three years ago is now running around with opinions and a personality and an entire interior life I get to witness from the front row.

I won’t pretend I always remember to feel the weight of that. Some days I’m tired. Some days I’m distracted by deadlines and inboxes and the thousand small fires of being a working adult. But when I stop — when I really stop and let myself feel it — the fact that I get to be her grandmother is almost unbearably good. She is proof that life keeps going. That love keeps making more of itself. That after everything this world throws at us, somewhere a two-year-old is learning the word “purple” and giggling at her own feet.

Mother’s Day

Being a mother has been the best role I’ve ever held. Not the easiest. Not the one I was always good at. The best.

Mother’s Day brings up a lot for a lot of people — and I want to say clearly: if it’s hard for you, if you’ve lost your mother, if you wanted to be one and couldn’t, if your relationship with your mother is complicated or broken, or if you’re a mother who feels invisible — your feelings are not in the way of gratitude. They’re allowed to coexist with it. Real gratitude doesn’t require everything to be beautiful. It just requires us to notice what is.

What I notice is that getting to raise the people I raised is the privilege of my life. Watching them become who they are. Watching one of them become a parent. Being trusted with their childhoods and now invited into their adulthoods. That’s a miracle I get to live inside.

Spring in Chicago

If you’ve never lived through a Chicago winter, you don’t fully understand what spring means here.

You don’t understand the way the wind comes off the lake in February and finds every gap in your coat. You don’t know what it’s like to walk to your car in negative-eight degrees because that’s just what Tuesday is now. You don’t know the gray. The gray is the worst part. The sky goes gray sometime in November and stays that way until April, and you start to wonder if color was ever real or just something you imagined.

And then one day in May, you walk outside and the air doesn’t hurt. The trees have gone green when you weren’t looking. People are on patios. Kids are on bikes. The lake is blue again. And every single time, no matter how many Chicago springs I’ve seen, I think the same thing: we made it. We actually made it.

That we survive each winter is, frankly, a freaking miracle. And spring is the receipt.

Why We Forget

Here’s the part nobody says out loud: we all know gratitude is good for us, and we forget anyway. All the time.

We forget because we’re tired. Because the news is heavy. Because someone we love is sick. Because our boss is impossible. Because the algorithm just served us thirty minutes of catastrophe. Because grief is sitting on our chest. Because we’re human, and humans were not built to walk around in a state of constant transcendent appreciation.

I refuse to judge that. I refuse to judge you for that, and I refuse to judge myself for it. The forgetting is not a moral failure. It’s just what the texture of being alive feels like sometimes.

But here’s what I’ve learned: the practice is not in never forgetting. The practice is in coming back.

Coming back when you remember. Coming back when something cracks you open. Coming back when a two-year-old calls you, “Mimi.” Coming back when the trees go green. Coming back when a friend texts you out of nowhere. Coming back when the hard thing you were dreading turns out to be survivable.

Gratitude isn’t a state to maintain. It’s a place you return to. Over and over. For the rest of your life.

This May

So this May, I’m coming back. To my granddaughter, who has no idea yet what she means to me. To my children, who made me a mother. To the city that just thawed out around me. To another year on this earth that I did not have to get, but did.

I won’t always remember. Neither will you. That’s okay.

We just have to keep coming back.