Gratitude isn’t always easy — especially when life is hard, motherhood is exhausting, and the holidays add more stress than joy.

You know you’re supposed to be thankful. You want to be thankful. But some seasons make gratitude feel like a performance instead of something real.

In this episode, I offer a different approach to thankfulness — one that goes beyond a list and into your heart.

We talk about:
* Why forced gratitude can actually backfire
* A deeper, more honest way to practice thankfulness as a Catholic mom
* How to be grateful even when your circumstances are difficult
* Grounding your perspective in Scripture instead of Pinterest

If you liked this episode, you’ll also enjoy:
 Simple Joys: A Chocolate Cake Lesson in Motherhood
 A No-Disappointment Christmas: Managing Holiday Expectations
 When Gratitude Feels Blocked

If you want to cultivate genuine, lasting gratitude — not just during Thanksgiving but all year — that’s the kind of heart work we do together inside Mary’s Heart Martha’s Order. Join us at catholicmomcalm.com/marysheart

And so many of you did that, and I just want you to know that. So again, I kind of forgot that I asked that because I do lots of work and I do the work far before it comes out. Not always.  Today, I’m recording this on the day it’s gonna come out. 

But I had forgotten about it. And then I was having a crummy day and I was taking a bath, and I was just like, Just one of those days where I’m like, is it worth it? Doesn’t matter, Lord. Like are you really calling me to this? And I happen to remember like, oh, I wonder if anyone left any reviews for the podcast. 

And so I pulled up my phone. And I started reading the reviews and I just like cried, like happy, cried in the bath by myself reading the reviews that you guys left. They were so kind and especially, I especially like the one who was like, I was very skeptical of that. But actually it is good. 

I’m very skeptical of things. In general. If someone says it’s great, I’m like, well, I don’t like it then. Like that. It’s so funny that my body has that this natural rebelliousness in it. I’m sure it’s not natural, it’s not from God. I’m sure it would not have had it in the Garden of Eden.

But for some reason it’s been wired into my body that I just like, if a bunch of people like things, I tend to immediately not like them and I have to come around. But I do come around and I’m glad that this person came around as well. And so you guys just said the nicest things and the Holy Spirit just knew that I needed to hear those things on that day. 

And I’m just very grateful for that. So thank you for all of you who did that. And I’ll just ask again because it’s so important. Please share this podcast with your friends, find a good episode and share it with them.

I’m gonna do a rerun of a No Disappointment Christmas because it’s one of my favorite episodes, but you could go find it right now from a past year and share that one. But I think that moms are really caught off. Guard by the feeling of disappointment in Christmas for particular types.

And I talk about each one and how you can avoid it if possible, and then process it well if it does end up showing up and you end up feeling one of the four kinds of disappointments. So continue to share the podcast. There are just millions of Catholic mom. I don’t know how someone reaches millions of Catholic moms. I don’t know how you do it.

But I think it starts with one person lighting one other person’s candle. I just love that we do that every Easter. It’s so special. I feel like it’s such a great visual for the body of Christ and that we just have to do that one small thing of lighting each other’s candles. 

Last thing I wanted to mention was, and I’ll link this in the show notes, I have a fantastic book, called Light in the Darkness, which is an advent devotional and it’s on Amazon. You can grab it and then when you get it on Amazon, it has a QR code to an audio version of the book where I do every day’s reading excerpt commentary and prayer with music.

So it’s really lovely and the music goes even longer if you wanna sit and pray and journal. And that’s just included if you get either the Kindle version or the hard cover version. It’s not hard. Cover the physical version on Amazon. So that’s called Light in the Darkness by Me. 

And then this year I am reading, Jesus I trust in you a 30 day personal retreat with the litany of trust by Sister Faustina Maria, who was named after the Saint Faustina. And I had just seen it recommended in so many different circles that I’m in and I bought it and it was  on my bookshelf and I was thinking, what am I gonna read for Lent? 

And I feel like the Holy Spirit just tapped me on the shoulder and went, you should do this. So I am reading, Jesus, I trust in you. It’s a 30 day, you know, just a little bit of information and then some questions. But so far it’s been really lovely and I will link that up too if you want to. Join me spiritually in doing that.

So today I wanna talk about being thankful for husbands. I may not sound super thankful for husbands, and I think partly it’s because I know I’m one of the few people who are willing to speak vulnerably about having a difficult marriage. You’re going through a different difficult marriage season.

And I think that’s important. I think it’s important that. We talk about things that are challenging to grapple with. And since I know that I’m willing to do that, I will do it. And I often talk about and share the personal struggles that I’ve had with my husband and that is a big cross and continues to be in our life. That we have kind of a painful marriage.

And, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not very thankful for him and thankful for husbands in general. And I want us to be thankful for them, and I fully acknowledge that I’m asking you to do that while knowing that you are starving for gratitude and starving to be seen and probably shouldering the majority of the load in your family is just often true for most women that they’re handling certainly more of the mental load.

But sometimes you guys are just doing literally more things than your husband is doing. It’s hard to measure, and I don’t want us to have a contest about that. But I had an episode for you recently which just said, Hey, you’re doing a good job, so go listen to that one. It’s just a couple weeks ago I said, Hey, you’re doing a good job. 

And that’s the episode where I just tell you you’re amazing and motherhood is important, and what you’re doing is such a special and important work. But today I wanna focus on being thankful for husbands because the world has really programmed us to dislike men.

And I was talking about this in my painful marriage program where we vilify men. For their big gross behavior, right? If a man is like big and loud and barky or angry, we vilify men for alcoholism, for watching porn, for sitting and watching football or playing video games.

And obviously watching football and playing video games are not intrinsically simple. Porn is intrinsically simple, alcohol. Right, and I’m sure there’s a non sinful way to drink and it’s hard to know where the line is on that. Just like a lot of things that we do as well. You know, when does scrolling become sinful and indulgent versus just leisure?

But we just really rake these guys ACOs. The Coles, we do not necessarily treat them respectfully. And I’m not necessarily saying you like, you might not struggle with this, but as a culture we do. And because we do as a culture, I think we’ve just normalized some things that are really not okay. 

And so, I was describing to someone about men watching porn, how I never ever, ever say that. That’s okay. It really, really isn’t. But I feel like if you took bits of heroin and put it in all of the chocolate milks in elementary school, okay. 

Like if you took, but just for the boys and you put little bits of heroin. I’m not even sure you guys, oh, you consume heroin. Isn’t that funny? So maybe you can’t put it into milk, but let’s just go with my janky analogy. 

So we put little bits of heroin in all the chocolate milk just for the boys. And then they all get addicted to heroin. And then they have, and their brain gets rewired because this drug is so intense. 

And then we spend the entire rest of their lives telling them that they’re bad, bad boys. And they should be able to control their heroin addiction. They shouldn’t have that weakness. They shouldn’t fall into heroin again. I feel like porn is like that. 

And I know it’s hurtful and I know it feels yucky and I know it feels dark and it just always feels personal. I mean, for a woman, it just feels like, why are you choosing to do that? Instead of like, you have a real body here and I’m here and I love you and it’s so embarrassing she can’t even talk about it with your friends. ’cause we don’t want anyone to know that that’s happening.

And. I just want you to know that this happened to them. I just want you to know that this happened to them, that the culture came so hard and fast with that internet and the computer, and we had no guardrails and our parents didn’t know what was going on. And it was everywhere. It was everywhere.

And it was like putting heroin in the chocolate milk. And it just got ’em, it got ’em so fast. And if you read the research on porn, it’s just devastating really. Some people have said almost more than some of the drugs in the way that it rewires your brain and really messes up their ability to like think clearly or think about sex clearly. And I just feel the deepest sadness for them. 

I just feel the deepest sadness for all these men and for the boys that are coming up, they’re gonna come up in this weird AI world, you know, and weird like anime porn. And now there’s gonna be robots and you can sex talk. AI agents probably, I mean, we’re just at the beginning of whatever weird, creepy world that’s gonna be.

And I’m not in any way condoning what they have done. And we always have free will and we always have a choice, but the addiction happened to them, and I’m really angry about that. I have righteous anger that the culture did that to them. 

And what the flip side of that, and it may not be the same coin, but women. Have been programmed. We had something similar happen to us in the nine, for sure, the nineties. It might have been sooner than that, like in the eighties.

But I think it wasn’t happening even in the sixties when we talk about free love and drugs in the sixties. I don’t know yet that the women’s minds had been poisoned against men. But certainly by the eighties and nineties, like when you start looking at television shows. And that’s how you know, you start looking at television shows. Look at the men on television shows. They are buffoons. They are idiots. We do not respect them. 

And even just take the example of friends and I was a nineties kid who watched friends. I feel like unless you were in an uber religious household, everyone was watching friends. What’s so funny is I would, I just don’t think I’d let my kids watch friends. 

Not like I wouldn’t let them, like it’s so egregious, but I just feel like why? It’s just got some weird messages in it. They’re all 30 year olds, like they’re pretty old, all living together, sleeping around with lots of people. They all have many, many relationships, casual ones.

Anyway, but if you think about Ross and Joey and Chandler and my heart still right now, the nostalgia in my body is strong. I’m like, oh, Ross. And Joey and Chandler. Chandler’s so cute and funny, and I can quote so much of that show. I mean, the amount of time I spent watching friends, significant.

And yet now as I’m thinking about it, they were buffoons. They were idiots. They made really dumb choices for 27-year-old men. There’s very little responsibility, like if you think about wanting a strong man who protects you and is a good provider and makes good choices, we are not thinking about those men.

And the casualness with which. Television shows talk about porn, right? The number of times that show and those men reference porn is so many, it’s just totally normalized. And then if we think about like Homer Simpson and just what a buffoon he was. And if you just start thinking about your favorite movies from your childhood. What were the men like? What was happening? 

Recently, my kids watched a movie called Doggone Trouble, which is okay, it’s not life changing. It’s twaddle. Okay. But it’s a cartoon about a dog. Who was raised like in a mansion with this woman, and she passes away. And in after she passes away, there’s some confusion and the dog ends up like on a moving truck and then put in the city. 

And the show is about them trying to get the dog back, but the dog realizing, oh, he has no idea how to be a dog. Because literally he had like a butler who like trimmed his nails and sprayed perfume on him and fed him steak and cut it up for him. All these things, right? And it’s a cute premise.

But there is a woman and a man who want to inherit the money from this woman who’s passed away. And the woman is just so mean. To the man. Shut up Donald. I don’t remember what his name is, but I’m just picking them. Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Get behind me. I’m gonna figure this out. You can’t do anything right like that. 

And I recently watched Casper, which was also from the nineties, and it was the same. There was this woman who was trying to find treasure in the house. If you remember, this is a movie with Christina Ricci and Devon Swan, so I only remember it from my like 13-year-old point of view.

But as I was watching it, the way she talks to this guy who I think is her employee, but there’s some weird sexual undertones in their relationship. But she talked exactly the same way to him, just very cutting, very disrespectful. That’s our heroine. That’s what was put in our chocolate milk. That is the programming that we have received. 

And what’s worse about our programming is that the porn is really clear, right? It’s really clear that you shouldn’t watch porn. It’s bad, it’s sinful, it’s wrong. And it’s very clear every time you’ve done it, oh, I opened that website and I watch porn, right? Like it’s super clear. 

But our programming is about cutting men down, being disrespectful, treating them like idiots. And what happens when you treat men like that, by the way, when you’re really critical of them and you cut them down, they just kind of go, fine. If you’re gonna treat me like that, then I am just gonna do those things.

And that’s when we see their drinking go up and they’re like, I’m just gonna sit here and watch sports, and I’m gonna play video games and whatever it is. And I’m not saying that we are responsible for their behavior. They’re adults. They’re responsible for their behavior, but that behavior increases when we are cutting and disrespectful to them.

When was the last time you really looked at your husband and said, I think you are such a good man. I’m proud to be your wife. You do such a good job of taking care of our family, and I know that this episode is gonna come out the day before Thanksgiving and you are doing everything.

But I kind of, and I almost was like, maybe I should do it at a different time, but I’m like, no, that’s almost the point. The point is, we are so hard on these guys and so disrespectful and so cutting, and we treat them like Homer Simpson, and then they go. Fine. I’ll just be like that. 

And it’s not all of you, I know that, but it is a lot of us, and it is because we had 20 years of programming through music and movies and television shows that made men look like idiots. And so when we see any weakness in them, which is normal for humans to have weakness, you are not living up to your potential all the time every day. Right. 

But when we see it in them. I will tell you deep down, it just makes us feel a little bit unsafe, and then when we feel unsafe, we kind of act out and we want them to stop doing that and that we, our brain thinks that by pointing it out and telling them, Hey, why are you doing that? Don’t do that. That’s not great. Then they’ll clean up that behavior and then take care of us and we’ll feel safe. That is not how it works. My friends. 

What happens is we’re critical of them. We cut them down and then they live up to that expectation. And so I want you to just like slow run your hand up your husband’s chest and look in his eyes and say, I love you. You are a good man. Thank you for protecting our family. I am proud of how we are raising these kids. Thank you for this house and this life that you have helped me create.

And you may be in a rough spot with your husband right now. I certainly know what that feels like, but I still can always find things. I can always find things that I love about him and that I’m super proud about. He is a good guy. He is a good dad and he loves me and the kids so much.

And I just think today would be a good day to be thankful for husbands and thankful for men. And I just, I wanna hug an entire generation of men and say, I’m sorry that they put heroin in your chocolate milk and that you have to deal with that for the whole rest of your life. ‘ cause we have some understanding about that with soldiers.

You know that soldiers go to war and then they kind of struggle with PTSD for the rest of their lives. We like, we intellectually get that, but this man, this porn epidemic, it’s so painful and they have free will and they have choice. They’re not zombies. It’s not like they can’t do it, they can’t stop. But I think it’s so much harder than we realize. I think it’s so much harder than we realize.

One of my favorite websites, by the way, is, fight the new drug.org and porn is the new drug. But they have some really great research things on there about what it does to the brain, just so you can see it like, whoa, that’s what’s happening.

But remember. Our drug, our programming was this weird, twisted form of feminism that said, men are dumb, men are useless. You can’t count on them, and it’s okay to be disrespectful and sniping to them. And then when they don’t like that and they push back, we say, oh, he’s being violent. He’s emotionally abusive. 

Some people are emotionally abusive. I’m not saying that’s never true. But both of us are caught in this really yucky circle and we’re living in a weird time where it’s unnatural the way that most of us live, the way the communities are set up, it’s very, very unnatural and it’s only been a short period of time that they’ve been set up this way.

So we’re all like lab rats running this crazy experiment. And the boys are given porn when they’re young and the girls are fed programming. That’s completely unrealistic to how men actually are both good and bad, and then we’re all just sitting here feeling unloved and unwanted and grumpy. 

And so I just want you to know, you, to know that you have the power to step out of that. You can spiral your relationship up. You can just go tell him I love you, you’re handsome. Thank you for putting gas in the car. Thank you for, I’m trying to think of it my, like my husband always puts gas in the car and just a bunch of little things like that. 

And he just takes care of me. And they’re not necessarily romantic things ’cause he’s an engineer, but. My life would be a lot harder if he didn’t do a bunch of those not romantic things that he does for me, and I appreciate that. I’m very thankful for that.

So today we’re talking about being thankful about husbands, and I hope that gives you something to aspire to, gives you something to do. The brain wants to just talk about what it doesn’t like. So we have to work hard to tell it about what we do like. 

All right, my friends, I’m thankful for you and this whole community and the work that I get to do and just the Lord that the Lord brings us all together. 

Alright. I’m praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.