Mother Tongue: Thank-You Notes

On my desk a list of thank-you letters to write lies next to a pile of notecards. Okay, the notecards are still in a drawer. I’m behind. I’m behind on many things, all the time—but it’s weighing on me that I’m behind in gratitude. Tardiness here seems, well, ungrateful.

Of course, it’s not the actual gratitude that I’m not attending to. But I’ve given telepathic correspondence a really good try, and it’s proven consistently ineffective. Email seems insufficient. The promise of nice notecards, a good pen and maybe a cup of tea, plus time to really think about each addressee, is a lovely vision.

Unfortunately, the letter-writing ambience I’m holding out for is about the same distance from reality as it was last week. I will write these notes eventually: Don’t fret, you thoughtful gift givers, eagerly checking your mailboxes; you will be so pleasantly surprised to get a note from me in March!

I know I should teach—and model—the etiquette of gratitude for my children. I’ve suggested to Theo that he draw thank-you pictures for his gifts—an idea with two minutes of traction that so far has produced one drawing of Santa Claus (which I’m considering copying for everyone). But I fear we’ve passed the point where a thank-you note has any relation to the toy/book/shirt for which we are giving thanks. This mills about in my well-populated Dept. of Desultory Parenting.

But maybe Theo will draw a garland of shamrocks or flowers around Santa’s neck for a spring delivery. Will this teach him the art of creative adaptation? Or, better, that expressions of gratitude are appropriate and welcome whenever they arrive!?

Postal protocol aside, larger ideas about gratitude and time are preoccupying me. 

In the past weeks, I’ve followed two links (below) addressing time and gratitude in different ways. (In my experience, these topics rate high in terms of the percentage of forwarded emails devoted to them.)

One link was to a TED video in which an elderly gentleman talks about the importance of being grateful for the miraculous nuances of each day. I got teary when I watched it and thought: Yes. I am deeply fortunate. I should be more attentive to the miracle of each moment of each day. Because it’s true: Days are short, I am surrounded by gifts, the universe is a constant though capricious benefactor, and I believe that great beauty and magic abound.

It’s also true that I don’t feel grateful every moment of every day. I feel frustrated, sad, angry, harried, tired, and sometimes just zoned out in addition to feeling joyful, loving, energized, and grateful (I actually never feel rested). I also, often, feel guilty about not feeling joyful and grateful all the time. This Scrabble bag of daily/hourly emotional states is normal, right? Is that why we need so many reminders to be grateful?

The other link I received was to a blog post in which the mother-writer muses on the phenomenon of older mothers addressing younger ones in these terms: “This time with little children is so precious. I loved it all, and it went by way too fast. Make sure you enjoy every minute of it, honey, every minute.

Little-kid time is precious and short-lived and full to the brim of moments that make my heart ache with their humor and sweetness and impermanence. But enjoying every minute does not seem realistic. Maybe it should be, but it’s not.

Incessant whining, for example, does not inspire graciousness in me. Neither do poop blow-outs in grocery stores or my son clocking his sister with the hook of a bungee cord because he’s fishing and she’s the fish. I do try to adopt the 4 am magnanimity advocated by Zen Mama—and sometimes I can settle into this dark, timeless period with serenity and gratitude for the gift of cuddling a small, soft, sweet body whose every facet I utterly adore. But I can’t always do this, and my occasional ability is severely hampered when vomit is involved.

For me, the consciousness required to actively appreciate and note the brevity of and be intentionally grateful for every minute of every day and every minute of my children’s days creates a running nostalgia for moments even as they happen. This premature wistfulness-in-the-moment kind of cancels out the freedom of just being in the moment. (I am sure there is a Zen way around this, and finding that is definitely on my to-do list.)

Does my tendency to take too much for granted, to dwell too seldom in contentment, to even, yes, sweat the small stuff—mark me as spoiled? I am so often running late that I physically trip over myself and my kids (and shoes and furniture), not to mention our moments. Is this rushing a damning sign of inattention? Maybe in accepting these tendencies as human, flawed as it is to be human, I can claim a gratitude that feels more like celebration and less like a mandate.

The other mother blogger distinguished between the Greek chronos, or chronological time, and kairos, which is more qualitative; she called it God’s time.

According to the dictionary, it literally means “opportunity.” According to the Great Oracle Wikipedia, kairos “signifies a time in between, a moment of indeterminate time in which something special happens.” I’d add that it also can be a moment in which nothing special happens, and that can be just as remarkable.

Understood this way, there are infinite kairos moments in a day. Recently for me: my daughter discovering cookie dough; the sound of her singing to herself and the dog in a patch of sunlight on our filthy floor; my son’s tangled head on my pillow during our morning cuddle; the got-it! catch of his feet on the pedals of his bicycle, his green vest and orange bike against wheaten January grass; the purple-gray sky of a resting snowstorm and the cold dot of one flake on my eye; the release of just leaning against my husband’s shoulder.

They aren’t always happy or cute; they aren’t always any one thing at all. I wonder if they carry an element of knowing everything could fall away, that the specter or reality of loss is always at the deckle edge. But maybe that consciousness is too far beyond the actual moment to qualify. I’m sure my grasp of the whole concept is superficial, but very often for me, kairos is simply tied to a certain angle of light.

It takes time to register kairos, so even these out-of-time moments are temporal: As much as it might be the inspiration for pausing, kairos is defined by the fact that I took the time to pause. And breaking from my chronos fixation prompts a blush of quiet gratitude—something like saying grace without even knowing the words.

I couldn’t logistically do this for every chronological minute even if I felt compelled to. But I can regularly cup my hands around a gathering of kairos moments—and I’d do well to end the day curled around their little glow instead of dialing in tomorrow’s schedule.

They don’t make kairos date books or iCal applications, which is good; I’d take way too long deciding which color I’d want. And kairos seems removed from chronicling anyhow, though I don’t know how to talk about kairos moments in aggregate without resorting to terms like “collection,” “handful,” “reservoir.” They are that, but perhaps they’re more akin to offerings: donations that aren’t quantified or expected, but whose noting is both a privilege and a responsibility.

How I experience kairos changes my perspective about moment-to-moment priorities. This includes letting myself and others off the hook for delayed thank-you notes and even for not remembering what discrete kairos moments were years hence. I will remember some of them. I am astonished by the countless many I’ve forgotten (I almost wrote “appalled,” but that judgment kind of defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to get at).

The fact that I allow myself to pause at kairos moments spontaneously and without attendant “shoulds” has to be enough—that’s the opening for love and thanks at its purest for me. And each time that I do this, I send out a little, virtual thank-you note.