Happy Thanksgiving!

With the upcoming Thanksgiving, my younger son made a list at school of all the things he was grateful for. Christmas with cousins and Taco Tuesday ranked the highest on his list. My teenager doesn’t do lists, but we all know how thankful he is for his friends and his Rad Power bike. My husband always says he is grateful for the family and food, but he can go on about his blessings for hours if you let him. I somehow struggle to put gratitude into words.

It’s not that I’m not grateful. I am. My head is filled with warm thoughts of appreciation, but feeling grateful always comes with a twist. Talking about feeling grateful is even harder.

Growing up Catholic in Poland, we always wished one another happiness, health, prosperity, and other blessings, but admitting to actually being happy, healthy and prosperous was a different story. Talking about having and achieving was not done. It was viewed insensitive. It could easily be considered bragging. Verbal modesty was a safer, more empathetic philosophy, even if some might view it hypocritical.

My parents didn’t help to foster my sense of healthy gratitude either. Growing up with three siblings, in a family that believed that money didn’t grow on trees and there was a limited supply of everything, I was often aware or frequently reminded that my blessings came at a cost or disadvantage of someone else. I was told to be grateful, but gratitude seemed a convoluted feeling, inseparable from feeling selfish, privileged, or lucky.

This year’s Thanksgiving is going to be my 16th feast of gratitude. Every year I hoped that celebrating an official Thanksgiving Day would be transformational and fix my twisted relationship with gratitude. Gratitude was a lifeskill after all. There must be things we can be grateful for without feeling self-centered. But every year I had to conclude hat the miracle was yet to come.

Sometimes we spent Thanksgiving with friends or family, with a football game playing on TV. Not very transformational. Sometimes it was just the four of us at home. Cozy, but empty at the big table. Some years, especially earlier on, when our sons were little, I cooked eagerly. Since most of the ingredients and dishes were new to me, come fall, I was religiously watching Food Network and learning celebrity chefs’ secrets for juicy turkey, golden corn bread and creamy pumpkin pie. Butter was usually the main secret, as I found out. The only transformation that occurred was culinary though.

With all the cooking and eating, instead of feeling grateful, I sat down to dinner feeling tired and guilty. Why did I agree to roast the whole turkey for my husband and sons, who didn’t even like turkey? It was so wasteful. Thanks goodness we had a dog that was grateful for all the leftovers she could get.

The very thinking about my inability to feel simply grateful for anything was filling me with anxiety. I took a few deep, slow breaths. It usually helped me relax. And there it was. Maybe it was breathing? Breathing was certainly one of the things I was grateful for, without any twisted feelings. We all could do it.

Whether it was diaphragmatic breathing, by expanding my stomach, or breathing by expanding my lungs, the power of this simple, natural exercise to calm me was undeniable. And it only took a few seconds, a minute at most. I was grateful to and for all the people who introduced me to it, whether it was through books, yoga, or coaching sessions. All of them achieved what a certain Lamaze instructor fourteen years ago couldn’t.

So maybe this Thursday will lead to a miracle after all. Maybe this Thanksgiving, if I only remember to breathe, as I fill my body with more oxygen, I might actually breathe out pure gratitude.