Neglected Gratitude

Bring to mind every person who ever gave you a hand. Set aside, just for now, all the times they fell short. Hold on to what you actually received from them, even if they're no longer someone you can lean on. Look back far enough and you'll almost always spot someone who came through for you at least once. Even a person who hurt you badly may have, somewhere along the way, done one thing that worked in your favor.

We're wired to catalog what went wrong more readily than what went right. The small kindnesses from the people who treat us well tend to slip by unrecorded, while we assign outsized weight to a gesture from someone who mostly lets us down.

Why does that happen? A favor from a person who usually keeps their distance can feel like it means more than steady, reliable support from someone else. And when the reliable one finally asks for a little credit, we wave it off: "Oh, that doesn't count."

I think of a mother with many children. Two of them cared for her, and at different points each took her into their own home. Yet whose visits lit her up? The children who rarely showed and rarely did anything for her. Sounds shallow when you put it that way. You might feel the same pull with your own relatives: if a particular person isn't the one helping, their help somehow registers as nothing.

There's another angle here. Sometimes it isn't family who shows up for you. Other people get placed in your path right when the family you expected to be there wasn't. Nobody is entirely or permanently bad, and no family is without its wreckage.

I know this one from my own life. When I was younger I spent a fair amount of energy listing what my parents got wrong in raising me, and almost none on the good. There was good. They sent me through four years at a private college. Holidays and family gatherings mattered to them, and they made them happen.

I'm not trying to shrink whatever went wrong in how you grew up. But when you examine your upbringing, usually there's more than one thing on the table. Maybe the bad genuinely outweighed the good. The good was still there.

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