The things we go through in life before we have children. 

The things we go through for our children. The things we don’t tell them, the things we do say instead. The parts of ourselves they may never fully know, but only glimpse at in the silences where we are lost in our heads, the moments where we erupt in anger or sorrow. The things we cry at and the things we don’t. 

The pain we keep from them, from ourselves, until we’re unable to. The pain we sit with, and what it does to us over time, how it changes us. Makes us softer, or harder, or both, in ways that don’t make sense.

The ways we love, and the ways we learn to love better. The ways we teach and are taught, by people and circumstances we never expected to learn from. 

The ways we are loved, the things that make us feel the most loved. A ring that materializes on a finger, waking of a birthday morning. Saying you want to make your late grandfathers proud, and being told “you’re better than both of them.” A look that says “I’m proud of you,” when you know those words may never come out in that order.

The people we are, and the people we are becoming. The people we came from, part of who we are, and the people we are, entirely our own creation, transplanted, grown in different soil.

The ways we can never show our thanks enough. And the ways in which it is simply enough to be here, and to exist; that is thanks enough.