Thank-less

Nov 19 Tell someone you know how grateful you are for the work they do. Share your story here.

It's Day 19, and I think I'm all thanked out. Maybe I don't have 30 days of gratefulness in me.  

I tried to write about how grateful I am that my 85-year-old mother-in-law does my laundry, but it turned into a rant about how many Fitbits and iPods she's unintentionally sent through the extra-soak cycle. 

I thought about penning my gratitude to the UPS driver who manages to navigate our driveway almost daily without running over our ill-behaved dogs. Or expressing my gratefulness to my husband for finally fixing a ceiling light that I'd asked him to fix last July, August, September.... 

It seems that in the shadow of my gratefulness lie my shortcomings: I'm too frazzled to do my own laundry. I can't train a dog. I am a shrivel-hearted nag. 

You see, the dark side of gratefulness is its implied need. Reciprocity calls for me to repay those I lean on--or at least to say thanks.  Somehow tonight I've shrunken to a new level of small person, resenting the indebtedness that gratitude implies. 

Oh what a fuss I am! This isn't what I meant to write at all. I can't seem to find a way out of what I've written, and I can't bear to start all over. 

Tune in tomorrow to see if I have sloughed my dusty snake skin.