Month: January 2016

We live three minutes from our elementary school. At most. If I wasn’t already in the car to go to work myself, there would be no excuse for driving, except maybe “winter” (because, ick). Our goal is to leave the house at 8:20, giving the girls a chance to find their friends in the morning and take a deep breath before the day begins. If we leave by 8:30, we can still probably make it, sometimes before the early bell, but definitely before the late bell. Especially if I’m willing to run back home after the bell has rung and grab my youngest’s glasses, my oldest’s lunch… (knock on wood, it’s been a little while).

At 8:35 every morning, Monday through Friday, an amazing thing happens. Somehow, 650 children arrive at our neighborhood elementary school. A line of cars, meticulously guided by school staff, weave in a one-way circle through the school parking lot. There’s not even so much a kiss-and-go policy, but an efficient stop-and-roll. Stop the car, kids roll out. Blow a kiss, call a few reminders behind them, and move out.

I feel a sense of solidarity when I leave the car loop. Every parent making that same right hand (only) turn has, in broad strokes, lived the same morning I have. There were teeth to be brushed, hairbrushes to be found, shoes to be paired. Is it gym this week (sneakers required) or is it art and cowboy boots? Who wants a cheeseburger today? Anyone, anyone? Yeah. I don’t blame you. We’re late! Let’s go! Everyone – even those timely children – are part of the common experience of, you know, mornings.

And so I leave the parking lot feeling at one with my fellow parents. And yet, at some point throughout the day, the morning, even just my drive, this feeling begins to dissipate. Just a bit… what are you waiting for that green light to issue you a personal invitation? And maybe there’s a little fissure in the foundation of good will as I get to work and pass the empty desk, again, of that one co-worker who has somehow managed to work from home for various vague reasons for a year. Wouldn’t that be nice? Wearing leggings every day, and doing laundry on a whim at noon on a Thursday? Deep breath. Seriously, we’re out of tea again? I show up, in person, every day! I deserve free tea!

I don’t think of myself as a particularly angry person. I follow multiple yoga practices on Instagram! I love sunsets! And musical comedies! And yet, the fact remains that by the time I get home, 9 hours after the comradery of car loop, I’m tired. I burned myself, just slightly, on the oven rack. Did we seriously eat the Girl Scout meeting snack? How do I possibly owe the school library $18 for your lost book? Have you even looked? If I look and I find it, I swear you’ll owe me $18. And… now I’m standing in the tidal wave of stagnant water from emptying the dishes “pre-soaking” in the kitchen sink. And I need to change my shirt. Little things. Little. And yet.

There’s no shortage of anger. Lately? Always? Maybe it’s not particularly new, but it feels palpable of late. Whenever I turn on the tv, scan breaking news, or god forbid read the comments section of anything, anything at all. An article on Top Rated Children’s Games? Is everyone ready for an online brawl about screen time, childhood responsibilities, the comfortable malignment of Millennials and whether preschool should be free? Okay. So… that’s a no on Just Dance Revolution, then?

Because in the past decade, my empathy gene is routinely refreshed by Disney and Pixar movies, I defer to Inside Out to try to understand this. Anger is a red brick whose head bursts into flame when he gets truly steamed. Been there, buddy. But at the heart of it, Anger – per Pixar – is about fairness, or rather the lack of it.

We get angry because our expectations aren’t met. We had a plan, even if we weren’t consciously aware of it, and the plan fell apart. I planned to get out of the house on time (no one said our expectations had to be realistic or reasonable). I had a plan to leave work five minutes early, to get home in 15-18 minutes tops, and now 23 minutes later (yes, my commute is super short; I should never be angry), I’m cutting it really close to being late to the next thing. We expected to be recognized at work, at home. We expected a friend to stand by us, a marriage to last. Whatever it is, for each of us, all of us, it boils down to, I expected, in this moment, for my life to be different. Easier, happier, fuller, less covered in dishwater… different.

The thing about anger is that it’s a creepy lurker. We’re not always aware that it’s there, but we get a weird feeling that pricks between our shoulder blades when we’re otherwise calm. Then out of nowhere, it’s bursting out from behind the bushes. You again?!, we think. Or we don’t think at all, because anger’s like that. We often don’t talk about anger until we’re apologizing for it. Or we’re holding on to it because, damn it, life didn’t work out how we planned and if there’s nothing else to control, it’s going to be this, this moment, this argument, this round of a 12-round fight.

The United States seems to be mid-match right now, hanging on to the round like there might not be another. There’s an acrimonious brawl that’s spilling into our perceptions of who we are as a people, as a nation. Disagreement isn’t the issue. Disagreement keeps a person, a country, from thinking too much on the surface, from stagnating in status quo. But the rhetoric filling the airwaves is divisive and alienating. Debate is good, but it has to start from, end in, a place of dialogue. Guess what? Compromise doesn’t mean that everyone wins. Often, it means everyone loses. That’s not a disaster. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s the point. Each side concedes a loss in order to move forward. Does the thought of that, of concession, make your blood boil, just in theory? Because it does mine, a little. But, but… why should I bend? I’m not the one who’s so clearly in the wrong here.

Are we a mirror of our political process, or does it mirror us? It’s certainly hypocritical of me to admit to my own hair-trigger volatility and then judge the anger of others. We tend to judge our own anger as righteous, a moral high ground on the right side of history, whether it’s our own small dramas, or the national or global stage. We see their anger as – at best – maybe ignorant. The cycle continues, grows deeper. Now, it’s not just unwitting collusion; it’s contemptible. Abhorrent. Us, them. Other. And that works for us, because it’s a lot easier to judge, and dismiss, someone when you’ve drawn a clear line between us and them.

From the Oracle of childhood, who should be required reading for adulating:

Then the North-Going Zax puffed his chest up with pride.
“I never,” he said, “take a step to one side.
And I’ll prove to you that I won’t change my ways
If I have to keep standing here fifty-nine days!”
“And I’ll prove to YOU,” yelled the South-Going Zax,
“That I can stand here in the prairie of Prax
For fifty-nine years!  For I live by a rule
That I learned as a boy back in South-Going School.
Never budge!  That’s my rule.  Never budge in the least!
Not an inch to the west!  Not an inch to the east!
I’ll stay here, not budging!  I can and I will
If it makes you and me and the whole world stand still!”
~ Dr. Seuss: The Zax

It’s a malicious malcontent that makes us choose anger over reason. We’re better than that. We’re better than the nativist, xenophobic rhetoric that has begun to define this political cycle. As a country, we have expectations that aren’t being met. They’re different for everyone, and sometimes diametrically opposed. I’m pretty solidly sure in my convictions, but I can recognize that makes them right for me, not right for everyone. I haven’t lived my whole life yet. Who knows what sum total of experiences will shape me going forward, or have shaped others in their past… shaped me in my past. But for as many reasons, and more, as there are citizens, we’re disappointed. In our politics, our global image, our direction, each other. We’re angry. That’s not the problem. Anger can be an impetus for transformation. But when was the last time you made a really great decision in your life when you had flames coming out of your head?  I’m going to be honest. I’ve burned bridges, I’ve said things I can never take back, and I’ve felt righteously, indignantly RIGHT. Sometimes, looking back, I’m still sure I was right. Sometimes I’m sure I was wrong. Sometimes I’m just sorry no one called for time out. The problem with anger is that it’s not reliable.

My daughter is an active volcano, not necessarily erupting, but there’s a lot of seismic activity going on under the surface. You can’t rule an eruption out, but you don’t know when it will be or what might cause it. In the meantime, you just live your life, and then… the ground rumbles. When my daughter gets upset she will, occasionally, run upstairs or outside, “I just need to calm down!” she’ll yell. Sometimes she’ll repeat the process several times. Sometimes she’ll give up and just go to bed. Sometimes there’s lava and we all get burned. I empathize because I’m more volcano than lake myself. But even at 7, she knows that the solution, even when it feels elusive, is to take it down a level.

Robert Frost wrote, Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.

Anger is fire and ice. It’s fear and it’s disillusion. It’s disappointed expectations and a sense that we didn’t get ours, large and small, and there’d better be someone to blame because it’s just not fair. Truth. But as my daughter told me when she calmed down recently, Angry is just part of life. It really is. And since it is, we’ve got to learn to channel it. To march ourselves to our bedrooms until we’re able to speak rationally, and then figure out why we’re so ticked off and what we’re – reasonably, realistically, responsibility – going to do about it. Because we can all do better.

 

You know that cartoon of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy; he’s trying to get his mother’s attention as she’s laying down, pretty much comatose from parenthood, “Mom, Mom, Mama, Mum, Mommy…” and when she finally responds, Stewie says, ….wait for it…. “Hi.”

It’s funny because it’s true.

One of my friends is traveling on business a lot lately, and her day job is not completely ideal. “As long as you get to go back to the hotel, turn the tv to whatever channel you want and eat food from a take-out container balanced on your stomach, completely alone,” I said. “Well, that’s pretty much my every day, anyway,” she replied. Well… huh. While she is, in fact, both younger than me and living my fantasy, I still really like her.

I’m not saying I don’t have a pretty great life. Because I do. I’m not wishing it away. And I’m not projecting that everyone who gets to control their own remote control must love it (or hate it, or even anything in between). Clearly, that’s a gross simplification of my own fantasy. Let’s say daydream. Occasional daydream.

But… Sunday morning. I’m meal planning for the week, recipe hunting and pantry assessing, still in my pajamas. “I don’t want to leave the house today,” I say. “I don’t want to get dressed.” “By the time your list is done, you will,” my husband predicts. I pull my warm coffee mug closer, and wish I remembered, ever, to actually put on the cozy bathrobe that hangs in my closet. Winter weekend mornings really bring out the hermit in me.

My youngest is talking. Talking. Talking. She’s drawing characters that she’s pulling out of her head, and then drawing their corresponding houses. It’s cute. Creative. My husband turns on a Sunday morning news magazine. I visit the recipe sections of reliable food bloggers. Healthy Kung Pao Chicken, only 8 ingredients. Sold. Chicken burrito bowl casserole. Cheaper than Qdoba, for sure. Oooh. Chai hot chocolate. Not exactly dinner, but … cardamon, allspice, ginger… Did I use the last of the ground cloves for gingerbread at Christmas? Speaking of spices, I think I definitely used the last of the sage for Thanksgiving stuffing. I should put that on the grocery list. I only use it once a year, so it’s rarely top of mind.

“Mommy, how do you spell Mimi? Do you like how I’m drawing her feathers? Mommy, do you want to draw something?” My husband is putting away dishes and re-loading the dishwasher. To be clear, I’m appreciative of this. It’s just so loud. Clatter. Clink. Porcelain against porcelain. Silverware against glass. “Can I paint my nails? I want to paint them blue like the sky and then draw grass. If I have room I’ll put a sun.”  A screech of a fork across a plate and the whirl and hum of the garbage disposal. “Mama, do you think my nails are dry enough to paint the grass? Can you touch this one to see if it’s dry?” I’m moving canned goods around in the cupboard. Black beans, garbanzo beans, Great Northern beans, kidney beans, lentils… no pinto beans? Really? Aren’t kidney beans and pinto beans the same, anyway? Like garbanzo beans and chickpeas? “Mom, the yellow spilled!”

In my heart, I know that these are days, moments that will never come again. I know that in the – hopefully – 60-ish years I share with my children, these first 18 will be a blink of an eye. For my oldest, we’re already at the half-way point of that first sprint. And because things happen that we don’t anticipate, I can’t count on the final 40 years to make up for time lost in the first 18. I know that so many people – Erma Bombeck to Dolly Parton, John Lennon to Sheryl Sandberg – are attributed brilliant quotes about getting the balance of our lives properly adjusted. Love more. Work less. Be present. And yet … I just need a little quiet. I just need a little peace. A little time alone.

Over the weekend, the night was growing late. We do a really poor job of policing bedtimes during long weekends and vacations. Oh, you don’t have school for four days? Well, then… let’s do whatever we can to make sure your circadian rhythms match those of a native Icelander during the days of midnight sun. What could go wrong?

I retreated to my bedroom with a book about navigating our messy, beautiful lives. Four minutes went by. “Mommy, there you are. I’ll sit with you.” And my youngest settled in with me, writing a journal entry on her Chrome book. “Mommy, if I say, tomorrow, too, is that ‘to’ or ‘too’?” (I appreciate that she knows there’s a difference.) “How do I spell painting?” Gritted smile. P-a-i-n-t… Navigating. Messy. Beautiful. Life. Deep breath. And then… “Do you want to read my journal?”

(journal excerpt, edited for spelling)

“Me and my family painted the wall well my daddy did most of the work in the painting project and it was so much fun to do with my family. I had a great day with everyone and I am starting to feel it was the best day in the world or even in the galaxy so I am hoping tomorrow will be too and I hope that’s the same for all of you around the world.”

Heart, full. Guilt, rising. Oh, right… Not just noise. Not just buzzing inside my crowded brain that, lately, more than occasionally can’t think of simple words or what I meant to do next. “That’s beautiful,” I told my daughter, sincerely, as she scooted off the bed.

“Will you be okay now?” she asked. “I just didn’t want you to have to be alone,” she said. Her default decibel is loud and constant, but her heart is incredibly sweet.

My reality is pretty wonderful. I recognize it, and I’m mostly very grateful. Alone is still my daydream. Deafening silence still sounds beautiful in the hypothetical. We’re in a constant state of doing it seems. Weekends come and go before we really settle into them, and then the week is off and running and we never had a chance to truly shake off the week before. I could try getting up 20 minutes early, try meditating. I could finally go to yoga like I keep saying I will. But mostly, I’ll probably walk around with my jaw slightly clenched until I realize that I have a headache almost all the time. I keep searching for a magic island of peace and quiet and I forget that the noisy, rambunctious love surrounding me is also pretty amazing. Sometimes overwhelming, often stressful, but amazing.

I may spend more time than I used to staring blankly into space, trying to remember the word that was on the tip of my tongue a minute ago. This is normal, I’ve read. And not (necessarily) a sign of early onset Alzheimer’s or a tumor. It may take me exponentially more time to read any book, pausing three times per page to spell things, locate lost toys, and sharpen pencils. And sometimes I may spend double the time necessary in our bathroom, getting ready, dawdling, trusting in the only closed door in our house that is given a margin of respect.

But from what often seems like chaos, two remarkable, miraculous children are growing up, and I’m – still, constantly – growing up with them. I may never quite have it together. In the new year, I meant to start planning work outfits the night before. Save time. Look professional. Get to school and work before the buzzer. I wore a dress one day and everyone, from my family to my coworkers, commented. So, okay. Pulled together is still an anomaly. But… at some point along the way, I became adult enough to own all five spices required for homemade chai hot chocolate. So, even if quiet is hard to come by, bedtimes are missed and I never make it to yoga, I’m giving myself a little credit.

 

One of my favorite people in the world was recently dealt a bad hand and is navigating the end of a relationship. Unless you’re one of those high school sweetheart couples who has been happily married for 40 years, we’ve all been there. And it sucks. Anger, depression, finally acceptance with maybe a side of personal empowerment, or maybe a few scars… or both.

It’s the reason for literature, for music, for the arts in general. I can remember laying on my living room floor in the middle of the night, listening to Evanescence and crying while my dog lay beside me, worried, but a rock. Looking back, it seems a little melodramatic. But at the time, it was a purge of everything broken. Most of us have been there, and like childbirth or a homeward bound flight long-delayed on the runway, we know it’s only eternal misery until it’s done. I’m grateful for other people’s stories, other people’s words and lyrics. It makes us feel better about muddling through our own chaos. We embrace them because it reminds us that we’re not alone in trying to make sense of it all.

Love is a tough game. We’re brought up on fairy tales – further compounded by Disney versions, rather than Brothers Grimm – and then we’re supposed to somehow navigate the real world with only the knowledge that true love conquers evil, dragons, even death.

And then it doesn’t. Then it fails. Or we fail. Or someone fails us. And we realize that Disney didn’t prepare us for this. We know we’re supposed to end up with a happily-ever-after, but we still stood there, eating the stupid apple in the first place.

In high school, my first love was my best friend. I’d recommend it, as an introduction to love and loss. At the time, it was dramatic, a roller coaster of highs and lows. Many tears were shed. My grandmother once called him a rat, which was undeserved, but appreciated at the time. But fast forward a few years, and I was a very happy bridesmaid, and now it’s all warm nostalgia. In college, I went to England and met a boy who was woven completely into the magical experience of being abroad. He was smart, and sarcastic and a little bit punk and a little bit sweet, and there was no one there who knew me to tell me that he wasn’t my type. But it’s hard to love across an ocean, and it slid into warm nostalgia, as well. He sent my oldest daughter a teddy bear for her first birthday. She loved it above all her other stuffed animals until we left it in a hotel room in Illinois and learned the valuable parenting lesson of never letting a first lieutenant of the toy world leave the house.

It’s hard that we learn so much more in retrospect than in the moment. Possibly the most formative relationship of my young life was the one that wasn’t. I was Eponine, Jay Gatsby, Katniss’s Gale. It was the age of Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette and Natalie Imbruglia, and they served me well, as did my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Christina Rosetti. Promise me no promises / So will I not promise you / Keep we both our liberties / Never false and never true.

Out of that wasteland, I rebounded into my first marriage. Someone damn well wants me; just watch me walk. It’s funny, because in the end, that’s not actually the best reason to get married. And it turned out that in my haste to prove something to myself, I’d chosen very poorly. Don’t get married at 22. Unless you’re that high school sweetheart couple who is going to be married 40 years. Then you might as well get started. But at 22, don’t marry a slick con artist 7 years your senior. I feel like that’s advice you can take to the bank. You’re welcome.

And so, there I was. 23, bruised and humbled, already tumbled out of a first marriage, and really none the wiser about love for it. When you’re an English major, you have a lot of expectations. Elizabeth and Darcy, Rhett and Scarlett, The Thorn Birds, Anna Karenina, Pablo Nerudo’s sonnets. Wuthering Heights is an awful book full of selfish, horrible characters. But I’ve read it multiple times, because in the end, if love is a tragedy, that is its zenith.

Luckily, way leads on to way. Fairy tales end as soon as the real story is about to begin, and in both Russian literature and Shakespeare, a lot of people end up dying. There’s middle ground to be found. We live, we learn, we figure a few things out. Love is still highs and lows, even when you’ve found your match. Some days you can’t believe you could be so lucky, you dance in the kitchen and hum in the shower, and some nights you lay in bed, your partner’s warm breath blowing against your shoulder and you think there would be nothing like a solitary desert island.

And I realize, that maybe I have less angst these days, but I still really enjoy belting out broken heart anthems alone in my car, because we’ve all been there. And even when we’ve found our person, it’s not all roses. And that it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect one person to be your everything.

As an adult, I’ve come to realize that the love we need is a fairly complicated Ven diagram. It’s the person we’re hopefully lucky enough to find as a partner; that person who knew going in that it wasn’t going to be all minty breath and candlelit dinners, but signed on anyway. At some point my husband realized that I was never going to organize the thousand tubes of product and make-up and lotion in our bathroom, but that I would flip out if the forks were misplaced within the silverware drawer. And he’s at peace with that. I think. But with no disrespect to my husband, it seems one-dimensional not to embrace how much additional support, other love, we accumulate in a lifetime. It’s the friends who were there to see the initial heartbreaks. They know what we looked like when we were finding comfort at the bottom of a pint of ice cream, or forgetting with too many tequila shots. They listened to the same stories over and over and didn’t walk away. They didn’t say, “You’re right,” but they said, “I know.” And they did. It’s the family we were born to, and the family we create along the way. It’s the first five people you text with big news, good or bad, and the person you haven’t seen a decade, but who you still plan to share porch rockers with when you’re old enough to sit and remember all about when you were too young to know better.

And so we’re a mosaic of different experiences, memories, lessons and scars. It’s kind of amazing when we find the people who will not only accept all of that, but embrace it. And when someone we love is going through a valley, we know, we get it, because we’ve been there. But I’ve got to believe that every time we are failed, or we fail, we’re therefore a step closer to our share of the answers; we’re closer to getting through to the other side.

I mentioned in the last blog that Christmas break involved the 1980’s Anne of Green Gables movies. Anne would have definitely spent some time listening to late night girl anthems, had she been born a century later. She had an artist’s soul. “You don’t know love when you see it. You’ve tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that,” Marilla says in Anne of the Island, when Anne is convinced that she wants a tall, dark and handsome stranger who could be wicked, but wouldn’t. Fictional Anne may or may not have read of Mr. Darcy. But we all stumble over our archetypes now and then, and forget to appreciate that we’re still incrementally learning, whether it’s the ebb and flow of our own love story, or the friendships that saw us through when our love stories fell apart.

I’m still a sucker for a heartbreak anthem, and for Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. But what Jane Austen was really selling was the search for a happy ending. Right after Christmas, the girls and I got the stomach bug. The girls first, and then, two days later, me. I was supposed to be taking our youngest to a daily basketball camp each morning, but about an hour before, on the first day, it became obvious that I wasn’t going to be leaving the house, maybe ever again. You forget how sick you feel when you’re sick. I called my husband at work, and he was home in 45 minutes, when work is 30 minutes away.

“Are you going back to work after you bring her home?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Someone needs to take care of you.”

And there it is. A modern fairy tale.

There is a Rilke quote that I’ve long liked, “Now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” It captures that wonderful blank slatedness of the new year, the limitless tomorrow, fresh with no mistakes in it (my eldest and I have been watching the classic late 80’s Anne of Green Gables movies over break, so that last phrase is particularly appropriate right now). As a writer, blank pages are close to my heart. As a human, fresh starts are vital. It’s no wonder that the world celebrates as the calendar rolls. On the list of common human experience, New Years, and the need for it, comes in close to the top.

Some years I’ve made resolutions. Big resolutions. Small resolutions. Public resolutions because accountability is key. Secret resolutions because sometimes a resolution is bigger and more daunting, more a heart’s wish than words. The thing about change, though, big change, is that it only happens when there’s something deep inside of us that opens for it. It’s a visceral internal shift, a raw, hollowed out rock bottom, or a quiet click of acceptance, but there’s no forcing it. When it really matters, it takes more than will power and more than 21 days of routine. If we want to floss daily, a New Years resolution is perfect for that, but I’ve found personally that my internal epiphanies rarely align with the Gregorian calendar.

In 2015, I came as close to a lifestyle shift as I ever have. I ate more food with fewer, or even better, single, ingredients. I have eaten more squash in more forms than I ever have before, and my go-to restaurant order has become grilled chicken or salmon salad. I have no regrets when I don’t eat the office doughnuts or the soccer practice cupcakes or the buttery garlic breadsticks. Actually, that’s a lie about the breadsticks. But true about the others. And I feel better for the squash and the zoodles and the almond butter and coconut milk. I recognize and appreciate that I don’t automatically feel the need to shove a child strategically in front of me in photos, or crop out half my arm. I’m more comfortable in my own skin than I have been in years and it feels good. And yet…

Just as they say that money doesn’t buy happiness (though, let’s all agree that that’s a theory each of us should have a chance to test), neither does being able to slip on your pre-marriage, pre-baby jeans buy sudden Zen. It turns out, if you eat a lot more squash, you’ll be able to flip out about your spring schedule, or your post-Christmas finances or your husband suggesting buying Star Wars tickets in the handicap row (where we’d look like jerks the entire time?!), while wearing jeans from 2004 (flares are back!)… but just as stubbornly, irrationally and temperamentally as before.

The new year will be full of things that have never been… and full of things that have been time and time and time again. I’m finally going to go to that barre class that I bought that Groupon for five months ago. I can walk there, so there’s really no excuse. And I’m going to take nine 8-year-old Brownies to an overnight at the Downtown Aquarium, enjoying some of my favorite other-mothers while we sleep with the sharks and stingrays. There are vacations to plan and projects to tackle. New year electricity is crackling like a siren’s call. And yet… in this brand new year, my mind will go slightly numb while my ears buzz with the daily non-stop chatter of my youngest, and I’m going to get home and realize that, once again, everything we might have had for dinner is still frozen. I’m going to listen to my daughter read, painstaking word by word, the lessons of the Berenstein Bears, while I secretly let my mind wander back to that thing at work, and forward to the moment when I can collapse into a book of my own. And then I’ll suddenly realize that these were the days, my friend, as I let them slip by with ill-concealed impatience, and I’ll promise to do better, to be more present. And then I’ll forget.  

This year, with that blank page waiting, I’m looking forward to the new year, but I don’t have any named resolutions. 2016 is beginning with the first above-freezing weather in a couple of weeks, and the Beck household has recovered from a round of post-Christmas stomach bug. The world does indeed seem fresh and new. There’s just something about New Years. This year I’d like to make more good decisions than bad. And remember to tell my husband that I appreciate him. And I’d really like to lose fewer arguments to the cat. Although anyone who has met the cat knows how unlikely that is.

Happy New Year, my friends. Breathe deep.