To be grateful

Sometimes it's the little things that get you through and make you happy. In those dark moments when you can't sleep because you feel like a heel and your stomach keeps churning, you can be grateful the morning sickness is medically-induced, rather than due to a baby growing inside you that you'd never begin to know how to take care of. At those times, one can breathe a sigh of relief that motherhood will not be happening for real, and just hope that all the sickness will at least pay off with a good complexion.
There is a sweet satisfaction in someone else's infant, though. Namely, in a niece who, though just ten months old, seems to know her aunt needs a little extra love and thus wraps her tiny arms around my neck and squeezes extra tight. Not once, twice. She keeps reaching for me. I'm sure it's not because I'm especially lovable. She just instinctively knows I love her more than life itself, and I need her.
It is liberating to actually have those moments when you can't care what other people think. It's not that I don't want to. It's just that the sustaining shoulder to lean on or the hand I hold publicly gets me through the big trials. I count on the love of my friend to not ease some trivial, temporary heartache or awkwardness, but to carry me when I feel like dead weight, struggling to reinvent myself into who I was all along.
I'm even happy to have someone I don't know tell me like it is, even when it cuts to the core. And I'm happy I've asked him to stop repeating gossip to or about me, so I can escape from the extra fetters of trying to please everyone.
I'm thankful for a friend I put on a pedestal. It's true that the man I love in my mind possibly bears very little resemblance to the friend in real life, but that doesn't keep me from aspiring to be like him or what I think he'd want me to be. And I'm grateful that when the real man offers me the easy way out, the man I know he can be someday still holds me to a higher standard.
Lastly, sickly, I'm grateful for a glimmer of hope based on a passing acknowledgement from the man I loved best of all. Even if it was secondhand, even if it was him cursing about a family with two members who have hurt both of us deeply. I do not delight in his anger or hate, but the selfish, natural woman in me lets my heart pound inside my chest knowing he is still real, and that for one brief moment, he was on my side.
These are the real blessing I count this morning.