Lessons in Gratitude Day 448

I have so much to be grateful for in my life. I spend time each day recounting in the blog the many ways I am blessed. Lately I have spent a lot of time expressing my deep gratitude to and appreciation for my siblings and their families. Each of them has held and sustained me over the course of my lifetime, and in particular the past 18 months or so. They have “had my back” in so many generous and wonderful ways I find myself hard pressed to describe them.

One of the more challenging lessons I’ve learned during my recent struggles has been to ask for help. I’ve never been particularly good at it; I was much better at offering help, responding to the needs of others, assisting and providing for other people. Asking for help, not so much. I had always thought it much easier to work it out on my own than to ask for help. I’m not sure if I thought it was a sign of weakness to ask for help or that somehow I should be able to manage alone. Whatever the case, it had long been my habit to limp along, suffering and struggling to do something rather than revealing to other humans (I prayed a lot to God…) that I needed their support in a particular matter.

Handling the series of unfortunate events that befell me in 2011 was no exception. I worked really hard to figure out how to do things myself even though this approach resulted in my getting farther and farther behind in what I needed to do to survive and move forward in my life. And asking for financial help was the last thing I wanted to do. When I’d left Michigan for California seven years ago, I was doing financially better than I had in my entire working life–I had a really good salary that enabled me to be able to help other people as well as give to charity, take care of my family, and meet my financial responsibilities with money left over that I could save and put away for my kids’ college educations, etc. I gave all that up to go to California with the hope and expectation of a good and satisfying emotional life bright with new possibilities. In the end, it didn’t turn out that way and I suddenly found myself without a job at all, loss of relationship and home, and a number of related, semi-calamitous events. From this place of difficult and desperate straits, I was forced to do what I had hoped not to have to do again: ask for help from the only people in my life to whom I could turn–my family.

It can be a very humbling thing to go to anyone to ask for help of any kind. For me, having to ask my siblings for financial help was humbling at best. After all, I had gone from living fairly comfortably to having very little income and no prospects in the foreseeable future. I was 50-something years old, graduate degree educated, with a 25-plus year career in higher education and I was starting from scratch. Going to my family to ask for money has dealt a serious blow to my pride, which is probably a good thing. After all, pride of that sort is not a particularly healthy attribute. I have learned to ask and to receive as graciously as I possibly can.

It still is not easy–over the past few weeks as I’ve prepared to move myself across the country to start a new job, I’ve continued to lean on the financial and moral support of each of my siblings. And they have contributed without question or hesitation. I pray that I can repay each of them in kind–not so much about the money, which I will find ways to repay as best I can over time–but more so with the loving, selfless attitude that each of them has displayed as they’ve helped me. Once upon a time I was in a position to give. I look forward to being in that position once again. But in the meantime, I will remain a gracious receiver and offer gratitude and prayers for each of my siblings for their generosity toward me and my children. May they receive blessings a thousandfold. So let it be.