Sunrise Gratitude List

Recovery started for me in 1978, the same year my people were given religious freedom and the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed. It was a good year!

Early in recovery, a woman asked me to write a gratitude list each day. As we talked about it, I couldn't think of much I was grateful for, so she helped me by saying, "Are your children healthy? Do you have a place to live, food to eat, a car to drive?"

Not fair, as she already knew that about me. But I got the idea and started the list. Not too long afterward, I was in a meeting when another woman spoke up and said, "My friend wants me to write a gratitude list every day as she feels I am feeling sorry for myself too much and that will help me!"

Now, forty-seven years later, I am still writing or saying the list out loud! Does that mean I still feel sorry for myself? Absolutely! Is it the same? No, not at all.

My feeling sorry for me is that I just turned 72. I'm old. The difference is I can think about the reams of paper I would need to write everything I'm grateful for! I just got back from a trip to Texas, where my brother lives. I was at his daughter's wedding in May last year. She just had a baby that I got to hold.

My children paid my way. I wasn't allowed to buy anything! That's nice, but what it says to me is that my recovery ripples out and it makes a difference in not just my life but in the lives of my children! So very grateful. Their father died at age 46. He thanked me for raising our children before he died.

For my children, I left their father when our daughter said, "Mom, we have to leave dad." What I didn't realize was that I was getting help for me and trying to provide help for them, but it wasn't enough for them. With him in his active addiction, we couldn't live with it after he had five treatments.

His comment each time was, "I can't quit smoking marijuana (pot), and each time it leads back to drinking." I loved my husband, and I said until death do us part in our marriage vows. I talked to a priest, and he gave me his blessing, and he said the church would too.

One year after our divorce, we got back together when he was sober. It didn't work. We weren't on the same page. We were different people. He got involved with a friend of mine from high school, and went back to drugs and alcohol, and I went to treatment, having been sober for 4 years.

Today, I don't regret the past or wish to shut the door on it! Our love was honest, and together we gave birth to two incredible children! So much gratitude for them. I think about him when I see him in our children, and now our grandchildren. No regrets! Grateful for him and them.

Again, early in recovery, I learned to pray for my kids' partners from Joyce Landorf at a viewing of her talk at a church in my little town. It was the best advice about children I could have gotten. I love my children's, grandchildren's, and now great-grandchildren's partners! Grateful.

When I first started attending support meetings, I told this woman that I didn't like anyone in those meetings. In my marriage, I had gotten to the point of not trusting women. She said, "Look around the room at every person and with your eyes tell them that you love them."

I thought this woman was crazy! Then she said, "You don't have to like anyone, you just have to love everyone." I found out that it works. There are still those I don't like, but I do love everyone!

It is easy to greet the sun, have a conscious contact with God, whom I call Gezhaymanidoo (Kind and Loving Spirit). I talk about being grateful that God is with people struggling with addiction, think of specific people, and then say, "Your will not mine!" God knows what my will is.

Occasionally, I will get a message about what I am to do or say. I take that seriously, as it is never something I would say to myself or even think of. This is living in the present, which I never did prior to recovery. I was always in the past or the future, never in today.

Greeting the sun helps me to be in the moment. A song I sing gets me in the present. The gratitude list brings me to the present and reminds me every day of just how much I have to be grateful for. Miigwech/Thank you, God/Creator/Gezhaymanido!