Common Miracles : Week 76
“Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.” - Pema Chodron
gracie girl @ seven
I have been trying to articulate this post for days, but I realized I just can’t say what I really *feel* in a blog post, so I’ll just go for it.
Gracie turned seven this weekend. It’s hard to believe that the little, bitty baby that came into our lives in July of 2006 is now a seven year old KID. Sometimes, I’ll see her walk into a room and just think “wow, that’s my child!”
But, on the other hand, I feel like I have known her all my life. Lately, different members of my family and some of my old friends are telling me that they remember me talking about Gracie when *I* was a child, a teenager. I don’t remember this, but apparently I told a lot of people I was going to adopt a baby girl. I just always knew it, I guess. There was a brief period in my twenties when I thought maybe my biological obligation in life was to reproduce, but other than that, adoption was always the plan. GRACIE was always the plan.
And here she is, sitting a few feet away from me and working on her own stuff. She’s her own little person but she’s also a big part of me.
Today (and every day) I am grateful for this person who has literally lit a spark in my life. She’s provided me with so much awareness and love. It’s like I got this tremendous opportunity to not only share life with her, but experience the world as a completely different place because I get to see it from her eyes, too.
The ironic thing is that as I have been writing this, she and I have been going back and forth about homework. She’s frustrated over writing and I’m frustrated over explaining the same thing over and over, and so we’re not at our best. But I still love her just as much as I did ten minutes ago, when she was her usual cheerful, confident self and I wasn’t losing my patience and being Cranky Mom. And I know that in ten minutes, we’ll be fine again. That’s how life with a child is. That’s how life with family is. I didn’t understand that until I had a family of my own.
It’s funny because it all feels so tremendous, raising a child, having my own family, and it is. But it’s also the very definition of a “common miracle”- a regular Monday afternoon with my girl, hanging out together, working on homework, and knowing that this is our daily life. A true common miracle, at least for me.
Common Miracles is a project I started in May, 2011 to examine and discover how gratitude works in everyday life. To find out more about Common Miracles please visit the very first post about this project, located here.