Gratitude

Long weekends are wonderful, even if they are filled with wind, rain, and tornadoes from a tropical storm!

School is going well...I mean "work" school. There are conflicts of course, but I do love teaching! I will be glad when I feel more settled, though, and I hope it will happen soon. I hope they're finished changing the schedules for both teachers and students. Poor kids - it is extremely difficult for them when they have no idea where they are supposed to go when. Consistency is key to reaching students with special needs, and when schedules change as often as they have this school year, these students become worried, confused, and upset. It bothers me because it doesn't have to be that way, and because the "powers that be" seem to not even understand that basic aspect of teaching Special Ed. Oh well, I am praying and doing my best, and holding onto my kids even if they have to walk all over campus with me because things are totally "haywire"!

Grad school is also going well. I have a pretty time-intensive assignment due on Sunday, more journal articles and summarizations thereof, but it won't be difficult to do. It may end up being Saturday before I can actually work on it, but maybe I'll have a chance to at least bookmark a few articles before then. We'll see. This class only lasts through mid-October, then my other half-semester class begins. Then I will only lack 5 courses having my Masters! I hope at the end of next summer I will be able to graduate! What a riot that will be, an old lady like me graduating again - lol. But I will enjoy every minute of it, especially if I can keep my 4.0 gpa and graduate with highest honors. Yes, I will be bursting with pride if I can do that!

And this is not what I had hoped to type about today. I plan to talk about gratitude and how vital I believe it is to the success of any relationship, specifically D/s relationships. I hope to present the idea that gratitude, like every other aspect of a relationship, must be balanced in emotion even if not in expression.

I truly believe that many of us struggle with submission because we struggle with gratitude. I am not totally sure why that is, but we tend to think of reasons to feel ungrateful rather than to be grateful. You know....maybe it *is* easier for me since I am not with Padrone daily. Maybe the gratitude I feel for what we have is due to the fact that I don't live with him. Maybe everything we have is totally false because I don't see him face-to-face. Maybe the past 6 years have been nothing more than wishful thinking.

But maybe not.

Maybe I do understand a bit about D/s relationships. Maybe I do understand the importance of gratitude, and expressing gratitude, as much as expressing love or ownership or whatever else one may wish to express. Maybe it really does make a difference .... to feel grateful for little things, big things, and life-changing things. Maybe that gratitude is a way of maintaining a measure of humility that is necessary when serving another - not humiliation, but humility. Maybe that gratitude and humility will go much farther in creating and feeding a desire for our Dominants to meet our needs, than being dissatisfied or irritable or expressing our needs/wants/displeasure with how things are going ever could.

Gratitude, to me, is simply a way to show heartfelt appreciation for who we are in a relationship with. But I am so grateful for so many other things, outside our relationship, and I am learning the value of a grateful heart and the affect that attitude has on the quality of my life.

Gratitude cannot prevent bad things from happening, but it can help us get through some of the worst things without going insane. For instance, when my daughter had her accident, it would have been so easy...*so* easy....to break down and collapse from the weight of the severity of her injury, the "what ifs", the responsibility of caring for her physical and emotional needs. And yes, I did struggle with it when I became so exhausted that I didn't even know what day it was or who I was speaking with on the phone. But for the most part, I chose to focus on the facts that she *is* alive, she *is* mobile, she *is* healing. I looked at the accident site and saw how close she came to hitting a power pole, and how that 4 inches might have changed my world entirely. I looked at the truck and shivered when I realized that her car would never have protected her that way. I saw the straightness of the road she ran off of, and how well maintained the land was, and closed my mind to the trees in the curve a tenth of a mile down the road. Every text asking for me was music to my ears, even though I was exhausted. I was grateful, AM grateful, to have my daughter alive, healing, and happy.

All of the negatives are still there. She *did* have a wreck. She *did* ruin her brother's truck. We *don't* have insurance. There *are* bad things happening as a result of her accident. But I truly believe that being grateful for the positive aspects has helped me to simply let the negatives be what they are, and not turn them into major issues. I deal with them when I need to, but they don't rule my life as they once would have.

Maybe that is why I feel as if this particular attitude is so vital to a healthy relationship. It has literally changed my life, my outlook, and my relationship. I never really have been able to explain this until tonight, but there was one moment, years ago, that I remember quite clearly. Padrone had another slave as well as me, and I had been having major problems with that, even though I knew it when he collared me. But one night, on the phone, I suddenly just....had an epiphany. I realize NOW that it was the beginning of my attitude of gratefulness that has grown and blossomed since that moment. All I knew then was that I had made a conscious choice to focus on him and on us and that the other woman was only an issue for me or for us if I let her be. And I didn't let her be anymore, until the very end of their relationship (long story and not mine to tell, so no details).

The point is that submission is not always easy. But it becomes so much easier when one approaches life and relationships with an attitude of thankfulness for what one has, rather than with eyes focused on what one wants.

Padrone, I had told you that I would like to focus on one thing daily that I am grateful for, and I am going to begin today by saying that I am grateful for peace of mind. I don't know where it is coming from, except from my faith and my belief in myself and in US, but I know that I am where I am supposed to be, doing what I am supposed to be doing, and learning through it all. There is so much more I could type here, but I will save it for another day. Thank you for believing in me, Padrone. I am yours, gratefully and wonderfully yours.