Being Grateful For The Hard Times

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"I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing." 

I found this quote by Agatha Christie and fell in love with it. We all have them...those painstakingly, heartbreaking moments that stay with us for a lifetime. While going through these hard times, we ask ourselves, "Why me? Why does this have to happen now? What did I ever do to deserve this?" There are moments in life that are simply unexplainable. In a blink of an eye, life can take a turn for the worse....and there seems to be no rime or reason.


Throughout life, while encountering these hard times {some tragic and some not so tragic} it seems that there's nothing that will or can make it any better...and certainly there can't be any good that will come from it. I've been guilty of this {as I'm sure many of us are} in only seeing the negative during these trying times.


I have some concrete and precise hard times that seem to stay with me nearly every day {mostly subconsciously} and have affected my life forever. I've spent years trying to process these hard times I've endured and try understand what good {if any} had come from them? 


One of the hardest experiences I've ever had to go through was my mother having two brain tumors. I was five and twelve when she had the two surgeries {it's still hard to this day to talk about.} Although the brain tumors were removed after the surgeries, my mother is still affected by them on a daily basis. I spent years of my life trying to cope with the pain I felt for my mother, along with the pain it caused my family. 


For most of my life, I never really dealt with the whole experience {a sense of coping mechanism I suppose} I knew it happened and I knew what it did to my mother, but I never really allowed myself to heal from it. 


Throughout the past seven years or so, I've slowly began to learn to cope with the tragedy of my mother's brain tumors {along with other difficult times.} I stopped allowing myself to ignore them, and started allowing myself to process them. 


Although, specifically with my mother, I still to this day can't say I'm grateful for the experience....I am grateful for the beautiful relationship I have with her and how blessed I am to have her as my mother. I appreciate my family more than I could ever express, because I know how fragile life truly is. 


What hard times really teach us, regardless of how traumatic they have been, is to have gratitude. It's taken me years to reflect upon this....that no matter how bad something is, something good really does come from it. It may take months, years, or even decades to begin to recognize the good, but it will come...you just have to be open to it. 

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