More than twenty-five years of parenting and caregiving for two medically fragile daughters stripped away any illusion of certainty. Plans became provisional. Assumptions dissolved. What emerged in their place was a kind of adaptable resilience, paired with an absurdist, sometimes irreverent sense of humor shaped in part by laughter and gratitude. Those practices helped me maintain balance and meet each moment as it came.
Laughter and gratitude did not fix the extended, emotionally draining intensity of my life. They didn’t resolve medical crises, restore vision, or make uncertainty disappear. What they did—gradually—was give my brain enough of a break to change how I reacted when things went sideways. For me, that internal shift mattered more than any external resolution.
For me, laughter didn’t minimize what was happening—it created breathing room. It softened my immediate reaction just enough to pause, reassess, and respond more calmly, instead of reacting with big emotions. The situation remained hard, but those moments of humor helped me endure the long hours of simply being there for both of my daughters.
Gratitude worked in a similar way. Not the performative version. Not the demand to find a silver lining before grief has even settled. I’m talking about noticing what was still present: snow falling softly outside a hospital window, being functional enough to pay the electric bill, or still being capable of offering support to one another. Gratitude didn’t cancel anger, sadness, or fear. It coexisted with the complexity of the situation and kept any single emotion from taking over completely.
Acceptance, as I experienced it, wasn’t a single moment of arrival. It developed slowly, in fragments. A laugh that surprised me. A moment of appreciation I didn’t expect. A recognition that even though my life looked different than I had imagined, I could still engage with it—adapt and choose how I showed up for my daughters.
Raising my daughters, McKala and Alexys, while navigating disability and medical complexity reinforced something important for me: resilience isn’t about being unbothered. It’s about having enough internal flexibility to meet what’s in front of you. Laughter and gratitude didn’t bypass the hard parts, soften the losses, or change the outcomes—but they gave me a way to keep showing up—to cope, to adapt, and to remain connected to my daughters and to myself, even when everything else felt fragile and unstable. That is what acceptance came to look like for me.
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