Giving Thanks

Around this time last year I was experiencing an uncontrollable feeling of dread. No matter what I did I couldn't shake it. A day with the feeling became a week, a week became a month. It caused such anxiety that I began to lose sleep, then my appetite, I lost nearly 20 pounds. Sometimes the feeling was so strong I called out of work. At times I would say to Jamie with tears in my eyes that "there was bad on the horizon".  Never in my life was I so nervous about something, even though I had no idea what it was.

I put the looming feeling to the back of my mind and enjoyed the Holiday season as best I could. Then on January 4th, without warning, I lost my Father. It quickly dawned on my that the dreadful feeling was gone, replaced by terrible sadness and grief. The weeks that followed were the hardest I've ever faced.

On February 12th, we found out Jamie was pregnant and although the sadness will never fully go away, it dulled ever so slightly that afternoon. In the weeks and months that followed Jamie and I tried our hardest to concentrate on the baby that was on the way,  on "her" way.

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I sat alone in a quiet gray hallway, nervously fidgeting about in my scrubs like countless soon to be Dads before me. Just beyond the heavy swinging doors in front of me was my Wife and our Doctor with a gang of various health care workers, prepping her for a C-Section. It was then when a feeling hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. Not a feeling of dread, not even an anxious feeling, but a familiar one. One that I've somehow known all along.

Nina came to us on October 11th.

Now here we are 6 weeks later and heading into another Holiday season, a year removed from when I first started experiencing those feelings. Anyone who knows me well enough knows I'm not a religious man and outside of Jamie and my immediate family, I've never really even spoke about the strange feelings and how they coincided with my Father's passing. At the time we chalked it up to a host of different things, the psychic connection being the least talked about. It sounded just too X-Files for such heavy times.

Was all of it just a coincidence? The terrible dread, losing my Father, the birth of our Baby Girl. Just a series of events that happened to fall one after another. Or was it something more? A force just beyond the word we know, working itself out, mysteriously. Who knows for sure? None of us I imagine.

What I do know is that this year I am thankful. I am thankful for my beautiful little family and the wonderful love that our house if filled with every single day. Jamie's laugh, Nina's tiny smile. The looks we all give one another as our lives grow, together. Shoot even our pain in the ass dog Harper is a vital part of our happiness.

Like most everything else in his life my Father gave his trademark grunt about the Holidays but they were always filled with family, laughs and good food and he was the center of it all. So all who knew him, knew he loved this time of year.

So it's in his spirit we will make merry as best we can and celebrate life.