{"id":49,"date":"2012-11-22T13:43:26","date_gmt":"2012-11-22T11:43:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zoeselina.com\/?p=49"},"modified":"2013-06-13T13:45:55","modified_gmt":"2013-06-13T11:45:55","slug":"grateful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/?p=49","title":{"rendered":"Grateful"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"This year, for the first time, I\u2019ve been invited to a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner at my friend Audrey\u2019s house. She and her husband are spending their first holiday season in Norway, and wanted to share a little piece of their home traditions with us, and we are really looking forward to it.<\/p>\n

But it got me thinking generally about how much I have to be grateful for this year, perhaps more than ever before in my life. It\u2019s easy to get caught feeling blue as the days get ever shorter and darker, with sunrise after nine a.m. and<\/span> the daylight only lasting until a little after three in the afternoon. The first thing I think of when I see the last shreds of half-light disappear a couple of hours after lunch time: this year I am lucky enough to be escaping the dark. This year I\u2019m spending my first Christmas at home with my family in seven years. Seven cold, dark Christmases in a row, and now I get to take my little girl home for a hot, sunny Christmas just like the ones I used to know\u2026 \u266a \u266b \u266c<\/p>\n

Which brings me to my daughter. How could I not be grateful for her? All parents are grateful for their children. But I feel she deserves special thanks for being almost freakishly well-behaved and easy-going. Who else has a two-year-old who asks if she can open a drawer to get a toy out, and then puts it back when she\u2019s done playing with it? Who else has a two-year-old who says please and thank you mid-tantrum? I may be eating my words if and when the so-called terrible twos finally hit, but so far life with my toddler is impossibly sweet.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On a professional level, I am ever thankful that I have the kind of job where it\u2019s still okay eighteen months after returning from maternity leave to work at 80% so that I can write one day a week. Okay financially, and okay with my company. My job is flexible so that I can leave to pick up my daughter anytime I need to, I can take four weeks off to go home for Christmas, and I can take ballet lessons in the middle of the day, run by a colleague who also happens to be an ex-professional danseur<\/span>.<\/p>\n

My writing is doing things I never would have dreamed of even a year ago. Back then I was slugging<\/span> away at my first novel, wondering whether anything would ever come of it. Now I have an agent who believes in it (and me) and has garnered attention from no less than five editors from big publishing houses. The second book is complete and I\u2019m about to start work on the third, but there have also been small successes with my short stories: I\u2019ve won a short story competition, had another story published in an anthology, have yet another under consideration for a magazine\u2026 I never dreamed I could come this far in such a short time.<\/p>\n

On top of all that, I have the love of a wonderful and caring man, who is the best father I could imagine for our daughter. Not only did he take the reins of his family\u2019s company the same week he became a father, he\u2019s brought it from the brink of bankruptcy to record profits in just two and a half years, all while managing to make it home for dinner every night.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m grateful to live in a country where it\u2019s natural and normal for fathers to spend as much time with their children as mothers do, and who have the support systems in place to manage it. A country where I feel safe almost all the time, where front page news stories are more often than not about the weather, skiing and kindergartens, not violence and crime.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not to say there have not been sad moments in the past year, or that everything is always peachy. But on a day where the idea is to stop and think about how lucky I am, I realise<\/span> that real life doesn\u2019t get much better than this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year, for the first time, I\u2019ve been invited to a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner at my friend Audrey\u2019s house. She and her husband are spending their first holiday season in Norway, and wanted to share a little piece of their home traditions with us, and we are really looking forward to it. But it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sdYBA-grateful","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51,"href":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zoeselina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}