A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Happy Thanksgiving dear Brave Writer friends!

This past year has seen explosive growth in our community of caring. I’m moved and touched by your participation with one another and the way you’ve opened space in your families for joy, peace, messes, and poetry. I love being a part of your lives. Thanks for letting me peek in and eavesdrop.

Each Thanksgiving, I like to remind you of all you do and how appreciated that effort is, even if hidden or taken for granted by the people you love. I see you. I see ALL you do. Thank you on behalf of the ones who count on you for your love and devotion.

I am thankful for you…

and for all the ways you give, give, and give.

Thanks for getting up in the middle of the night—again—with the baby and bed-wetter.

Thank you for holding back your tired, angry voice.

Thank you for hunkering down with a curriculum you don’t like but can’t afford to replace.

Thank you for making magic with vegetables and healthy snacks for reluctant-to-try-anything-new kids.

Thank you for overlooking the insensitive jab from your trusted partner because s/he is stressed and being a blockhead.

Thank you for examining your motives.

Thanks for exercising and/or eating right and/or taking your meds and/or trying hard to be healthy when it’s easier to give up.

Thanks for excusing childishness.

Thank you for celebrating childishness.

Thank you for being childlike with your children!

Thank you for the thankless hours you spend comforting your teen who doesn’t even like you sometimes.

Thanks for calling that friend, or your mother, or the sibling that wears you out because they needed you today.

Thank you for keeping house as best you can, in spite of the never-ending assault on your living space by all the people who love you but love your house less.

Thank you for washing an unending parade of dishes, for laundering every last pair of socks, for cleaning behind the couches once a year, for hanging pretty things to look at on the walls.

Thank you for research done, appointments scheduled, payments made on time, and performances attended with camera and heart in hand.

Thank you for not falling apart.

Thank you for getting up again when you do.

Thank you for holding it together long after you thought you couldn’t.

Thank you for pies, potatoes, gluten free rolls, vegan hot corn, turkey or tofurkey, and watching football and the extended edition of Lord of the Rings (again).

Thank you for the look of love that comes over your face when you consider how lucky you feel to be in this family with these people.

The work you do is invisible to many but well known to all of us who lead the same life you do. Well done!

Life morphs and changes; demands emerge and fade. Pay attention to your life; make choices that ensure the peace and well being of your loved ones.

That responsibility does fall to you, and we can be grateful that it does.

With power, comes responsibility. Use it wisely.

As I like to say: “Keep going.”

Happiest of Thanksgiving friends!

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