More Gratitude Give Me
By Susan Law Corpany

Alma Hashimoto is my model of gratitude. She is a cute little Japanese lady in our ward who loves to be with the children. When I was Primary president, I learned that she had served more than forty years in Primary.

Several years ago on her birthday I gave her three little teddy bears — in the Primary colors of red, yellow and blue — to thank her for her years of service to Primary. Every single Sunday that I have seen her since then, she has expressed gratitude to me for “my little bears.” She reports that she hugs them, talks to them and sometimes sleeps with them. She never misses a chance to thank me for them.

Whenever I am thanked for the little bears, I am reminded of how important it is to remember to be grateful. Often life lessons come to me in the “ah ha” moments with which I am blessed. I had one recently on the subject of gratitude when I called my mother to wish her a happy Mother’s Day. After talking with her at length, I realized that what she needed to hear from me that day was more than just a generic holiday greeting.

Thanks, Mom!

Deep in my heart is a well of gratitude for my mother, a woman who raised five children in a small home with one bathroom, and who managed most of the time to be an amazing example of charity, hard work and taking life with a sense of humor. She is the reason I reach out to people across language barriers, because she was never embarrassed to try to communicate, even if she came out with phrases like “Spreckenze Espanol?”

Mom has always had a sixth sense about her children. When she would send me care packages in college, they always contained greeting cards. Part of the reason for this is because she worked at a drugstore at the time, and she was in charge of straightening the greeting cards. She read them as she straightened and always bought a few, usually the funny ones.

Once a care package arrived, and along with the usual humorous birthday cards was a sympathy card. I called her up and gave her a bad time. “Mom, it is one thing to send me birthday cards or wedding cards in hopes that someone has a birthday or gets married, but now you’re sending me sympathy cards in hopes that someone will die?”

I ate my words the next week when the professor I worked for in the history department lost his mother. That sums up how tuned-in my mother always managed to be somehow to what was going on in our lives whether we were home or far away.

My patriarchal blessing tells me that I should listen to the counsel of my mother and that she will advise me well, even when I have established a home of my own. This has proven to be true many, many times.

My mother was able to point out to me, in a way no one else could, that because of having lost my husband I was being an overprotective mother, hovering over my little boy. Trying not to hover the following week led to an incident at the playground where, in his own words, “I walked in front of the swing and then I flied through the air like a birdie.”

When my reaction was that I should not have trusted our teen-age friend who said she would watch him and should have been there myself, I realized that my mother was right, that I was a hovercraft. He survived it, and he also learned never to walk in front of a swing set again without looking first to see what or who might be coming at him. I tried to lighten up, let him be more rambunctious, let him eat a little dirt, and he has survived to adulthood.

Motherly Insecurity

I guess I hadn’t realized until I talked to her that my mother felt insecure about her mothering because she had, of necessity, worked outside the home for so many years when we were growing up. She was accessible to us, and the jobs she had while we were in school were close to home and at places where we could stop by and see her if the necessity arose.

There were compromises we all had to make, but the upside is that my brothers and I learned to shoulder a little more responsibility as a result. In the summers, if we had the house clean when she came home, she would take us swimming. It is amazing how much cleaning five kids can do in the half hour before Mom comes home. We didn’t know we were deprived because no one had told us we were deprived.

I could go on for pages singing my mother’s praises. She started me on a lifelong love of reading, and from there comes my love of writing. So why is it that when I call on Mother’s Day, all I seem to come up with is “Happy Mother’s Day?”

This time when I called, she had been to a Relief Society lesson where the subject of working mothers had come up in a judgmental way. Out came an apology from her for not being a better mother and for all the years she worked when we were growing up. Prompted by that, I went into more detail.

“Mom, I know you wish you could have been home more, but I remember that you were home when we were real little. I remember that we came home from elementary school for lunch, and that you were there. I honestly can’t remember exactly when you started working, but I never remember feeling like I didn’t have a mother or that you didn’t have time for me.”

“I tried to work close by, at the drugstore or at the 7-11 when you were in junior high so that you could stop by on the way home from school and let me know how your day went.” Until she said that, I had never realized that her choice of places to work had often been based upon whether or not she could be close to home and not because she had wanted to work at that particular job — another sacrifice she had made for us.

“Mom, I hate to break it to you, but we stopped by 7-11 for the free Slurpees.”

“You don’t feel deprived because you had a working mother?”

“There was never a time that you weren’t involved in my life, didn’t know what was going on at school or what boy I had a crush on. You did all the things a mother is supposed to — teach me, discipline me, embarrass me.”

In fact, she did the latter rather well a number of times. “Whatever job you had, we worked around it. When you worked at Snelgrove’s, we loved that you got to bring home orders that were messed up. When you worked at the drugstore, you got me a summer job there two summers when I was home from college. And remember the guy I scared away with the wedding napkins that all had my name on them from when you worked at Porter’s Printing?”

When my mother worked at a company that printed wedding invitations and other wedding-related stuff, she always bought the discounted merchandise on which mistakes had been made that bore the name of anyone in the family. We always had a large supply of misprinted wedding napkins. I was having a fellow over for dinner once in my apartment, and had forgotten about the stack of wedding napkins on the table. As I added the finishing touches to dinner, he apparently sorted through the pile.

“Susan and Mark” Hmmm. April of last year

“Susan and Jeremy” Just six months later?

“Susan and Harold” Two months ago???

I brought out the dinner and grabbed a napkin, and then I noticed they weren’t stacked neatly anymore and that he had been looking through them.

“About the napkins, I can explain.”

“Just how many times have you been married?”

Dinner was delicious, but he never called back.

Mom and I laughed together as we recalled specific instances like this from the past. I pointed out the good things about her working, how I had been cooking dinner for the family for several months when my junior high home economics classes were teaching me how to make cinnamon toast. Eventually I felt I had convinced her that she had been a good mother in spite of not always being able to be home and that she had not seriously short-changed any of her children. She ended the conversation by saying, “Thanks! You said just what I needed.”

Attaboy

After the conversation with my mother, I contemplated how often we give a generic “thanks a lot” when we could say so much more. I told myself that I was going to do a better job of being grateful and of trying to remember to thank people in more meaningful ways.

I remember once talking with a group of women, and one of them disparagingly said of her husband, “He always needs his attaboys. I believe virtue is its own reward.” I wanted to ask her how hard it would be to give him a pat on the head and a dog biscuit, if that was what he needed, but I kept quiet.

Don’t we all like to be appreciated and thanked? How often we could fill the cup of another, without any cost to ourselves, by just remembering to express our thanks a little more often, a little more sincerely, and a little more eloquently. Sure, virtue is its own reward, but gratitude can put the cherry on top.

We can thank our teachers and leaders for all they do.

We can thank our parents.

Every day in which we wake up and our bodies work, we should be grateful for our health. Even as illnesses beset us, we can be grateful for the parts that still work.

There are service people all around us who keep our worlds operational. Today I am very, very grateful for the guy from Sears who came by and fixed our refrigerator.

There are people serving in the military keeping our country safe. Often I see others pick up the tab for their meals or otherwise express appreciation for the sacrifice they are making to preserve our freedom.

We should constantly be expressing gratitude to our family members, especially our spouses. Sometimes when I have complained that my husband doesn’t notice what I do around the house, he has countered by telling me that when he hands me his pay stub for filing, I don’t say much either. “Wow! We can pay the mortgage again this month!” I have to admit, the man has a point, and I have tried harder not to take for granted how hard he works to take care of our family. It is so easy to take for granted the very things we should not, the things that are consistently there and are so easy to overlook until and unless they are gone.

When someone says, “I couldn’t have done it without you,” or “I know I can always count on you,” it usually makes me want to work harder. Our Father in Heaven must also enjoy our gratitude more when it comes in detailed form. How many times a day do you think he hears, “Thanks for our many blessings?” That’s gotta get old.

This is an area in which we can all improve, with the possible exception of Sister Hashimoto. Too often we let a couple of drops of gratitude dribble out when our cup should be overflowing with gratitude.