The first time I saw my daughter was when a woman named Ushabin brought her to me at an ashram in India. As she placed that precious and beautiful six week old angel in my arms, I could not contain the tears that refreshed my cheeks as I was virtually overwhelmed with joy, gratitude, concern and fear. There was joy over the peaceful beauty of the precious child in my arms. There was gratitude I felt to God and those whom He had guided to that very place where I was then standing with my soon to be daughter. There was concern for her health since she had not been under the care of a physician since birth. There was fear that the navigation of the bureaucratic morass would be insurmountable and the adoption might not happen. I chose to embrace joy, gratitude, and concern and to relegate fear to a compartment somewhere beneath the realm of possibility. Had I done otherwise, fear would have taken its place center stage and rendered the episode a one act play. Instead, joy and gratitude fueled the engine that allayed concern with attention to what was needed for the health of my daughter. Today, she is a healthy woman in her mid twenties, a dedicated mother of a beautiful daughter, and filled with dreams of what possibilities lie ahead. Had that day in May of 1987 not been one on which I made a conscious choice to relegate fear to its proper place, today’s memories would be vastly different. Today I choose joy and gratitude. Memories are made of that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first time I saw my daughter was when a woman named Ushabin brought her to me at an ashram in India. As she placed that precious and beautiful six week old angel in my arms, I could not contain the tears that refreshed my cheeks as I was virtually overwhelmed with joy, gratitude, concern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parkinsons-disease-rants-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":978,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions\/978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}