The Parent of Peace

Guiding a Version of Yourself That Doesn’t Need to Ask for More

Thank you for coming back—or for finding your way here for the first time. However you arrived, I’m glad you’re here.

Hallo Kartoffelkumpel,

November has a way of softening the air. The sky dims early, and the world feels peeled down with what remains of the day. And so, on this, the last day of this cozy gothic month, I think it’s the right season to talk about gratitude without polishing it. Because as it turns out, you can’t gratitude your way out of reality…

It was just after 6:00 a.m.

The sound of the suction machine was still sloshing in my ears. Emma had slept in twenty-minute bursts, each one interrupted by a cough that threatened to spiral, by the low wheeze I’ve learned to hear even across the house. I’d spent the last few hours half-upright on the makeshift bed on the floor of her room, one leg tucked under me, holding her hand while we oscillated between treatments. Nebulizer, suction, reposition, wait, repeat. That strange choreography we know by heart.

The text came in just as I was wiping off the thermometer with an alcohol wipe:

At least she didn’t have to go to the hospital!

Exclamation mark and all.

I stared at it longer than I should have. The screen still lit in my hand, the glow feeling too bright in the dim of her bedroom. It wasn’t a cruel message. It wasn’t wrong, even. But it landed with all the elegance of last month’s soggy pumpkins.

This is what we do, isn’t it? We hunt for a silver lining like it’s the price of entry for conversation. We tell ourselves quietly (and each other not so quietly) that to be grateful means seeing the good. What monster sees good things and then is mad about them? This flavor of gratitude exists to reframe. You didn’t get the worst-case scenario, so you should be thankful. You didn’t drown, just swallowed half the ocean so please be happy with all that saltwater in your lungs.

But sometimes salt is all you taste.

I’ve become practiced at saying thank you. I say it to the case manager who cancels because of a scheduling mix-up. I say it to the friend who doesn’t call for six weeks but sends a meme. I say it to the doctor who shrugs after delivering uncertain results. And of course I say it to the stranger who tells me I’m such a good dad, as if they know, as if they’re watching me do anything but try to keep my daughter breathing.

There’s a dishonesty about it. Not the lying kind, more the kind that leaves things out, a lie of omission. The dishonesty that happens when gratitude becomes armor, when you start using it to fend off your own ache.

In the early days, I thought I had to be grateful. That if I could just focus on the bright I’d survive the dark. So I began saying things I didn’t always believe. I began accepting the framing that gratitude meant being glad it wasn’t worse, for small mercies, glad even when I wasn’t.

But I’ve started to notice the corners of my home, as in the literal corners. One holds the feeding pump and the IV pole. Another, the portable suction machine and a backup in case that one fails. Half of our living room is all machines meant to help her breathe better. Her closet doesn’t have cute winter coats and sports gear but a hoyer lift and medical gloves and distilled water for the BiPAP. The shelves in her room don’t have her favorite books and toys on them but extra tubes and spare syringes and vent filters in neatly labeled bins. We didn’t clear space for these things. They simply multiplied until they filled the margins, reshaped the outline of what used to be ordinary.

There is no neutral space anymore. Every room bears some trace of survival.

Gratitude, in this context, feels like a clean shirt I’m supposed to put on for visitors. It doesn’t account for the midnight panic or the fatigue that settles into my molars when there’s nothing to fix. It can’t hold the contradiction of loving someone so much it breaks you while also wanting, in moments too raw to admit out loud, for things to be easier.

You hear it often—at least she’s home or at least you caught it early or at least you have support—like gratitude was a form of math. As if by adding enough “at leasts” you could subtract the weight of this life.

But you don’t get to trade. You don’t get to round down the suffering just because someone else’s is more visible.

What nobody says is that sometimes looking at gratitude like this makes you lonelier. That it can become a script people recite to avoid sitting with what’s real. They want you to be okay. They want the story to make sense. But the story doesn’t always want to be tidy.

Sometimes it just wants to be told.

The relief is not always in the telling though. When you stop bracing against the expectation that you must be grateful, reality can finally settle in.

There’s a quiet that comes, sometimes, after the work is done (not finished, it’s never finished, but more like paused). The syringes washed and lined up to dry. The pulse oximeter blinking its steady rhythm. The Kartoffel asleep in the tangle of pillows we’ve shaped to hold her just right. The house whispering in that late-night hush, when even the machines seem to exhale. That’s when I feel it most—not pride, not relief, not even love, though love is always there—but peace. Not the soaring peace you chase but an earthier version that emerges when there’s nothing left to want.

It was easier when I thought gratitude was like math. Adding up the small wins, the good days, the moments of reprieve. Stacking them higher than the setbacks so the scale would tip toward joy. Easier, but cheaper. Because real gratitude doesn’t accumulate. It pares things down. It loosens the grip of wanting.

A certain peace begins where wanting ends. Not all wantings, not the kind that keeps us human. But the wanting that leaves us hungry, scrambling for more. The kind that says, If only she could sit on her own. If only we had a diagnosis. If only she slept four hours. And then, when those come—because sometimes they do so we move the goalposts—If only she could walk. If only we had a treatment. If only she slept six hours. If only…That multiplication never stops.

I didn’t learn this all at once. I learned it in the middle of the thousand tiny repetitions that shape our days. I learned it while unclogging the G-tube for the third time because the powder never quite dissolved. While resetting the BiPAP alarm at 4:30 a.m. with one eye open. While mixing meds in the half-light one of these bleak November mornings, my body moving before my mind wakes up.

At some point I noticed I wasn’t bracing anymore. My shoulders weren’t always up around my ears. My jaw wasn’t clenched. My tongue wasn’t pressing itself against the roof of my mouth. I hadn’t even known I’d been doing that until I wasn’t anymore.

I’d let go without realizing it. Not of the Kartoffel, not of effort, not of care. Just of the gnawing that comes from wishing. Gratitude, in this light, is what follows the surrender that leads to an open hand. The kind that says: I am here. I am in this. Nothing more is needed right now. That’s when peace finds a place to settle. Maybe because you’ve earned it. Maybe because the struggle has paused. But always because you’ve finally given it room.

And so the peace that begins as silence stays and reshapes the space you live in.

The living room is dim, but not dark. There’s a soft halo from the monitor screen, a quiet green light near the suction machine, the warm amber of another machine charging for tomorrow’s use. In one corner, the feeding pole stands like a watchful sentinel. In another, the backup suction machine crouches behind a nest of cords. There are banners on the wall from a birthday months ago, cheery words in cheery fonts, creased from humidity and sagging with a weight we all feel. We just haven’t gotten around to taking them down. Or maybe we put them back up again. It’s hard to say.

There are too many pillows and somehow never enough. I’m always adjusting them, propping this or that limb just slightly differently. Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent a third of my life arranging cushions.

The Kartoffel is asleep, or something like it. Her body resists the word. Her sleep is light, interrupted, full of small starts and positional discomforts. But her face is still. Her eyes, when open, hold that uncanny mix of looking wide and new while being impossibly old, like she remembers things I haven’t lived yet.

She is fragile, but also stubborn in her own way. She’ll fight the nebulizer mask for half an hour, then laugh when I choke on my tea. She’ll push me away when I’m trying to comfort her, then grab my shirt when she thinks I’m leaving. She is not the child I imagined. She is simply herself. And I love her—not in spite of that, not because of that, just with that.

The true expression of my gratitude for her life is not grand pronouncements, but this meticulous, highly tailored attention and the absolute necessity of knowing exactly where the pillows must go to create a space for her rest.

This is our life. I’m not waiting for a different one. I’m not reaching forward to pull some better version of the story into view.

Gratitude, I’ve come to think, is not how I feel about that—it’s how I do it. It’s in the string of rituals that make up our nights: the evening meds, the midnight diaper changes, the 2 a.m. seizure, the 5 a.m. position shift, the 7 a.m. meds again. The way I run the water just hot enough to dissolve the powder. The way I tap the syringe for bubbles. The way I hold her hand, even when I don’t think she notices. It’s doing all of these things, being here, being thankful for that, and not wishing I wasn’t. This labor is the substance of my present moments, the non-verbal exchange of care. It costs sweat and focus, which is why it means something, far more than the simple relief of saying “I’m thankful” ever could.

None of it feels particularly profound in the moment. It’s not romantic. But it is illuminated by the strange relief that comes from no longer asking your life to be other than what it is. Gratitude is not the exhale of thankfulness, or the swelling of happiness. Gratitude helps us to become our own parents, giving birth and guiding a version of ourselves that does not need to ask for more.

Gratitude, in its truest form then, is a companion to grief and the parent of peace. It is an integrated active state achieved through a surrender that starts with the letting go of wishing this life were otherwise. This internal peace is made real through ritual.

This lightness, this surrender, costs you nothing less than all your tomorrows. It demands your total presence in the now. It requires you to act in the concrete reality of today, no longer asking for more from a hypothetical future or demanding change from a remembered past. To love all of Life, and not just its sweetness.

You stand in that gorgeous wreckage you call your life, see the beautiful and the broken, feel the fierce love and the crackling pain, and allow them to share a breath.

And in moments like that, when I look at her—just look—the only thought left is:

This is it.

Until next time, stay safe, stay kind, and know that you are appreciated.

Cheers,
[kartoffelvater]

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