I deserve it

Jews greet the day with the following words: “I am grateful before You, Living and Enduring King, for You have compassionately restored my soul within me. Great is your faithfulness!”

And when I say “Jews,” I mean Jews other than me. I greet the day with the following words, “Ugh. Sunshine? Seriously? Kharmarflaflafraf coffee kharmarflaflafraf ugh.”

And sometime after that cup of coffee, grudgingly clothed and prepared for the day, I remember “Modeh ani—I am grateful before You.”

But just between you and me, internet, I’m not grateful. Not most of the time. 

Sometimes a crisis, like the physical issues I’ve been dealing with lately, brings my blessings into sharp focus. Mostly, though, I try to generate gratitude for all the incredible miracles of existence, and I am blocked by a single idea: “Magia li.” That’s a Hebrew phrase that translates to, “I deserve it.” Yes, miracles, very nice. But don't I deserve miracles?

I’ve been advised to generate the gratitude I don’t feel: to list my blessings, to read about the intricacy and beauty of every aspect of Creation. And I do those things, and I see that my life is steeped with blessings. The world is around me is fascinating and beautiful, and the more I learn about it, the more I am amazed. And I deserve it.

So, no progress, then.

You know that Chris Rock bit where he talks about men bragging on how they take care of their kids and aren’t in jail? He says, “What do you want, a cookie?! You're not supposed to go to jail.” I’m cleaning it up considerably. Don’t Google it.

I feel that way when people talk about how incredibly God sustains the universe. I deserve it! I’m healthy? I’m supposed to be healthy. I have enough to eat? I’m supposed to have enough to eat. I have a wonderful family? I’m supposed to have a wonderful family. You created me, You take care of me.

This attitude extends to my human relationships, too. My mother carried me for nine months, gave birth to me, nursed me, toted me around in a baby carrier, raised me, agonized over every minute decision of where I would go to school and what I would play with and what I would eat and a million other things. She gave me a Jewish identity and a strong sense that my opinions and feelings matter, that I am inherently worthy and precious.

And what do I give her in return? A big fat heaping of, “Here’s precisely how you screwed me up. But don’t worry—I’m working on it. I’m improving immeasurably.”

Thank you for your efforts, but, then, I deserve it.

* * *

Last week, I thought I couldn’t possibly feel any worse. It hurt to sit, stand or lie in any position, therapeutic treatments weren’t helping and when I finally squeezed some serious opiates out of my cautious family doctor, they made me too nauseous to take them. I felt pretty sulky.

But the next morning, I felt a little better. And each day I felt better until one morning, I got out of bed, and the first thing I said wasn’t “Owwww,” it was:

“I am grateful before You, Living and Enduring King, for You have compassionately restored my soul within me. Great is your faithfulness!”

(Except I said it in Hebrew, because it sounds kind of lame in English).

And I truly felt it, maybe for the first time in my life. I was filled with joy to be recovering. I still am. I can’t sit, but I can stand and walk and lie down, and I now realize that I can do almost anything without sitting down. Of course, I hope I get to sit again comfortably in the near future, but I also see that something has shifted in my perspective. 

I feel more aware of God's goodness running through all things, but that's not the important part. The key difference is that I feel it and I don't think I deserve it. It feels like what it is: abundance.

Some people hold the myth that suffering is inherently ennobling. Not me, sister. Take infertility, for example. I came through the other side of my years of involuntary childlessness and sagely remarked, “Well, that sucked.”

Infertility brought out some of my worse qualities: self-absorption, jealousy, fearfulness, impatience, judgmentalism, self-pity, superficiality, resentment, distrust . . . shall I go on? It might have been a growth opportunity, but if so, I missed it. I emerged, whole and cheerful, with beautiful twin daughters and with my bad attitude intact.

Which is all to say that adversity itself doth not a spiritual experience make. And in a certain sense, I’m glad I never got all peacey-accepty about the childlessness. It’s allowed me to look (unfortunately) many other women in the eye and say, “What you are going through is really terrible,” and mean it.

However, in the overall picture of my spiritual growth, I don’t want to face adversity with fear. It’s uncomfortable. And so I’ve been working on my attitudes, plugging along with my efforts to acknowledge gratitude to people and God. Even when it seems hollow. Trying to internalize that no one and no One owes me anything. I can only do this when things are going really well, though, because my threshold for grouchiness is so high. My constant hope is that if I try to improve my worldview when things are going well, it will please please come in handy during harder times.

When I was in so much pain, I had a running thought that was something like, “whywhywhyyyyyynoooo.” Writing about it here helped me stay focused, but I still felt a lot of self-pity and fear. And yet? If this experience can help me stop feeling so jaded and entitled, can bring me closer to real gratitude, it’s totally worth it.