Though I don't spend time complaining on Facebook or Twitter very much (Unless it's funny. Funny complaining gets a free pass.) I started doing the Month of Thankfulness three years ago in 2011. It was a little over a year after Steve died and about three months after my father died. And while I had started to work my way out of the widow fog earlier that summer, my father's death sent me spiraling right back down. I don't know when the toughest time of my grieving was but I can say that after dad died, it got scary for me real fast.
The Month of Thankfulness was a way to get my head out of the circling thoughts that I failed my husband which was why he was dead. Thoughts that life was never going to be worthwhile again and the best I could hope for was that I might be useful at least once more before I, myself, died. I hoped that if I had to think about one positive thing a day, really concentrate on it, for an entire month, I could change the tide in my thoughts. That I might find hope again.
I look back at that first year and I couldn't even manage to think of something every day. Frequently I didn't remember to post. In my zombie haze days would go by without me registering that time had passed. But I also have vivid memories of sitting on the couch, looking around the room, hoping that my eyes might hit on something that would trigger a thankful thought. In the end, I only managed eleven out of thirty days. And I had a nice long string of those days, too. Those posts did work, in a fashion. It got me geared up for Christmas, New Year's Eve, and my birthday the following month. Gave me some momentum to head into the holidays with a bit more verve than I would have otherwise.
The second year I was nervously dating the Piper with his two young girls. I spent a lot of time bouncing between feelings of elation and excitement to feeling like a adulterous whore for cheating on my dead husband. It was a wide spread of emotions that kept me wondering about my sanity in a completely normal-in-an-abnormal-situation way. It was as close to normal as I'd felt since Steve died and it refreshed me, and drained me, in ways I hadn't expected. But I managed to post every day. When I look at those posts, I know what overwhelming whatever I was looking at each particular day. Cause even then, maybe especially then, a day at a time was all I could manage.
This is my third year of posting the Moth of Thankfulness. I'm only a few days in but I can already see a new pattern emerging. I tend to post well after midnight, when the kids are in bed and the Piper is brushing his teeth. The time where I have that rare quiet moment to myself before the pillow whispered I-Love-you's and the bedside light gets turned out. That's the moment I have to look back on my day and think "This is what I want to remember. This is what I don't want to forget." My posts this year are the stupid little daily interactions that occur in a life. Those silly little every day moments that I haven't had since Steve died. That I never thought I'd have again. The sunbeam slipping through the clouds to brighten up the world for a split second before disappearing again. How I revel in these moments.
So I'm going to be that annoying woman who posts what she's thankful about each day. Cause, you see, they all boil down to the same thing:
Day 6: I'm thankful to have a normal life. To, once again, have little things each day that joyfully grab my attention. #WidowThankfulness
— Kiki Marcus (@KikiMarcus) November 6, 2013
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