Some days, the spread of my kid’s age difference and the stages that they’re in respectively, exhausts me and I find it challenging to focus on the gratitude I definitely SHOULD be feeling. I have two healthy, joyful kids. I have the privilege of staying home with them. I have supportive family around me. A lot, A LOT to be grateful for. But I’m human. Like, real human.

While you don’t have to look very far to see circumstances more challenging than your own…even though I know it, even though I don’t want to disappoint God or myself, I actually have to remind myself over and over that the frustrations I’m facing are minuscule. Dwarfed by real challenges. And though in this lifetime, it’s inevitable that I will experience heartbreak at some point, I don’t want that to be the thing to make me finally appreciate how good things are right now. So I have a philosophy to get me through the toughies:

Fake it ’til you make it.

Meaning, talk like a grateful person, even (or especially) if I’m struggling with gratitude, in the hopes that saying what is true and right will turn my ‘tude around.

For example, when Francie is laying across the door of the dishwasher, screaming because I won’t let her impale her eyeball with the fork, while I’m trying to empty it, I say, “I’m so grateful she wants to help me with the dishes”. Or when I want to sleep so bad it hurts and Soren wants to sleep with us, horizontally across the bed with his toe in my rib cage, I say, “he won’t want to sleep with me forever, I’m going to enjoy this now”. Or when the potty-training that I can’t seem to get to stick results in a super-man-sized poop in a pull-up…no wait, I’m never even pretend grateful for that.

And whether I’m saying it to Soren about Francie, Francie about Soren, to a friend, my mom, a total stranger, myself aloud or inside my head for only God’s benefit…often through gritted teeth these days as I deal with behavioral/heart parenting with Soren and never-being-able-to-keep-tabs-on-her parenting with Frances…both of which require more focused attention than God ever gave this lady, I say it. I say I’m grateful and with enough repetition, even on the hardest day, my heart is turned and every word is real.