Counting My Blessings

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. --Melody Beattie

I am not one who takes her inspiration from one-hour television dramas; but two years ago, it was a rerun of ER which lit my dark path through to the next phase of my life.

I was facing my first Thanksgiving without Chaz, who had walked away from our marriage three months earlier. I was still in shock: depressed, despondent, and discombobulated. We had started negotiating around the communal property of the marriage that once had held our dreams but now lay in shambles, and things were not looking good.

We had agreed not to hire lawyers and litigate, but rather we chose to mediate our divorce, a fitting choice for two people who had met and fallen in love while serving as community mediators in San Francisco fifteen years earlier.

At the start of the process, a friend warned me: “Marriage is about love; divorce is about money. Get a lawyer.”  Everyone said: “Get a good lawyer.”

I said no. I didn’t want to participate in a hostile divorce. I wanted a “spiritual divorce” as spelled out by Debbie Ford, author a book of the same name. I wanted to walk resolutely through the fire of anger, grief, acceptance, and onto gratitude and liberation.

“You what?” my friends exclaimed.  “You know YaYa,” chuckled one of my closest confreres, Father Charles. “She’s always got to be so spiritual,” he laughed. (And this, from a priest!)

One meeting into the mediation process and it was clear Chaz was going for the jugular. California divorce law allows for the 50-50 split of communal property. Chaz wanted half of my retirement, half of our savings, half of my TSA (a tax deferred account), alimony, and he even pursued stocks that I had brought into our marriage, but never commingled.


Was I naïve? Was I crazy? Should I fight? Should I fold? Can I trust my own counsel? Should I follow my heart? Damn, trust my heart? Look at where my heart had brought me thus far.

Then, one afternoon, submerged in my funk, I was mindlessly flipping through television channels, only pausing long enough on each station to determine that its contents was of no interest to me, when I chanced upon a scene at the end of this particular ER program.

Two doctors, (I don’t even know the characters names) are sitting on a bench outside of the hospital. The two have been discussing what I can only guess was some type of trauma that one of the doctors had experienced, when the consoling member of the pair asked: “What if this didn’t happen to you, but, it happened for you?”

The experience of hearing those few words was like sitting in the optometrist’s chair as she slips different lens in and out of the heavy frame, trying to decipher exactly what is the proper prescription for your particularly challenged sight.

“No, this one is fuzzier than the last one.”
“Yes, this one is a little clearer.”
“No, this one is not quite as sharp.”
“Wait! Wait a minute! Now I can see clearly!”


A number of years earlier, I had entered therapy during a crisis in my personal life. My loving, kind, maternal therapist told me, after only one session: “You, my dear, are entering a phase of life I like to call ‘re-membering.’ You are about to go in search of, find, and re-member parts of your lost self. When you finish, you may not recognize the person you have become."


With a slight shift of my lens, I saw that this divorce experience was just one piece, albeit one very painful piece, of a much larger picture of my life. I had to trust the invisible hand that was rearranging the pieces. I was called to endure the dismemberment of this aspect of my life in order to create a more whole soul.

As I sit here on the eve of this Thanksgiving holiday, counting my blessings, I realize the need to be thankful for the trials and tribulations of life. They, too, can be transformed into blessings. “…for count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing this, that the testing of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, lacking nothing." --James 1:2-3

Chaz did receive 50% of the communal property, and he was awarded an alimony allotment, though it was for much less than he originally asked.

I have just finished paying the first year of alimony and I’m grateful I have been able to do so without extreme financial hardship. I am thankful for all of the support of my family and friends during the past two years. I am eternally grateful for the new me I am becoming, and for the gift of a new, precious love.

But most of all, I am thankful for the certain assurance that the Goddess Will Provide!


Gratitude ... goes beyond the "mine" and "thine" and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy. --Henri J. M. Nouwen